If the purpose of journalism is to awaken and bring about a qualitative change in the lives of people, then the all-woman team of Khabar Lahariya (news waves), a digital media platform almost exclusively reporting rural news from India’s heartland, deserves kudos for carrying out this task with exceptional courage and dedication.
Drawn from the lowest rung of India’s caste ladder, this team of reporters has been creating waves across Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest and the most populous state where caste system has a vice-like grip on the society. The good news is that the story of Khabar Lahariya reporters’ struggle to bring about change by challenging the caste system and rampant corruption in society has been made into a documentary film that is already being touted as a possible first Oscar winner from India.
Media reports suggest that the reporters of Khabar Lahariya have built a huge following across Uttar Pradesh and earned the respect of their village communities by covering local stories often overlooked by established media outlets. Being village women, these reporters had to fight their own families as well as local authorities to create their own identity as journalists. For them just stepping out of their houses was a challenge, but they have overcome all odds to establish themselves in the trade and earn the respect of society.
Fighting an entrenched culture of prejudice against women, the Khabar Lahariya team has been recording the plight of exploited women folk in UP’s countryside, very often subjected to sexual assault and humiliation of other kind. Having built a reputation for themselves as fearless journalists, these reporters are now approached by all kinds of people who want to highlight their problems. They have been chronicling people’s woes relating to problems as common as municipal neglect leading to lack of clean drinking water and dirty, overflowing drains to issues as serious as rape and honour killings.
The best thing about Khabar Lahariya is that it has given women a voice and encouraged female members of UP’s rural belt to share their stories as victims of sexual harassment and violence. The issues that were earlier hushed up under societal pressure and domination of certain castes are now increasingly coming into open. This has resulted in cases being filed against the perpetrators of such crimes and victimized women getting justice for the first time.
Khabar Lahariya, to be honest, has set a new benchmark in rural reporting, a genre that is increasingly becoming popular but needs more support, especially financial support, in order to sustain itself. At a time when media outlets around the globe are passing through tough times, it is extremely important to extend support to ventures such as Lahariya which has become a potent symbol of women’s empowerment.
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