‘Mic in hand, I find my voice’: the female reporters from India’s villages
Women signing up to a groundbreaking digital journalism school follow a four-week course on their mobile phones
Holding her phone at arm’s length, a crowd gathered behind her, Amreen Khan speaks into the camera. “Today, I am in Chandpura village,” she says, “where the government is trying to drive out residents from their homes, claiming the land belongs to the state.”
Over the next few minutes, Khan details the story of this village in Chhatarpur district, Madhya Pradesh, where she found dozens of people at risk of losing their homes. It is the kind of social injustice that the former nursery school teacher has long wanted to bring to light, but didn’t know how. Now, newly graduated from India’s first digital journalism school for rural women, she knows exactly how to do it. “I always wanted to do something to improve the condition of my village. I finally feel like my dreams are coming true.”
Khan, 35, is one of 270 women from villages in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar states who joined a pilot programme at Chambal Academy. The academy has sprung from the success of Khabar Lahariya, the rural, female-run news organisation that was the subject of award-winning documentary Writing with Fire in 2021.
Khabar Lahariya employs 40 women. With the academy it will reach hundreds more women, teaching reporting skills, and also an awareness of digital security, fake news, social media and how to document the impact of global issues including the climate crisis on their communities.
“We designed Chambal Academy’s training programme as an online-only platform to make it accessible to more women, who can do it from home on their mobile phone at their own pace,” says Suneeta Prajapati, 25, coordinator and the face of the academy’s video tutorials in Hindi.
India is the second-largest online market in the world, with half of the projected 900 million active users by 2025 expected to come from rural areas, but women are at a huge disadvantage. According to government data, only 25% of women in rural areas have ever accessed the internet.
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