Khabar Lahariya: An all women led digital newsroom from rural India, brings changes in stereotype society

 

'Khabar Lahriya', became the only digital rural news network in the country. It not only serves groundbreaking "real" journalism  from rural India, but also breaks all gender based taboos that exist in our country.

Khabar Lahariya produces hyper-local reports and gives voice to local people

‘Khabar Lahariya’ is working in the rural areas of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Chhattisgarh. What makes Khabar Lahariya unique is it's journalists, women from Dalit, tribal, Muslim and backward castes made unique this digital newsroom every day just by doing their job fearlessly.

Khabar Lahariya was started with an objective to produce local and independent content, bring a feminist voice to local media, and establish women as journalists in small towns and villages and now is  published in various rural dialects of Hindi, including Bundeli, Avadhi and Bajjika dialects.

Khabar Lahariya, which literally means ‘News Waves’ in Hindi was started as a local language newspaper in 2002 with the support of a Delhi-based gender education organization called Nirantar. The NGO had helped the government execute the literacy programme in Uttar Pradesh.

While talking about how the Khabar Lahariya began, Ms Kavita Devi  the co-founder of Khabar Lahariya said-"Once the government’s literacy programme was over, Nirantar started a four-page broadsheet newspaper called ‘Mahila Dakiya’ with an aim to continue to educate women and give them a voice. Not only did it enable the sustained production of reading material in local languages and promoted an overall environment of learning, but it broke gender and caste barriers too. This is how some women of Banda including me entered the world of print journalism which was mostly dominated by men in the region at that time. I do not have any degree or formal education in journalism. Mahila Dakiya was discontinued and in 2002, Khabar Lahariya was launched with the support of Nirantar and a staff of seven women who wrote, produced and distributed the fortnightly newspaper in Bundeli and Hindi languages. It was an eight-page weekly local newspaper that covered everything from local to global news."(source: NDTV)

Khabar Lahariya is run under Chambal Media,

Khabar Lahariya is India's only grassroots, feminist news and media platform, housed under Chambal Media and run by an all-women team of reporters, editors, and media practitioners, reporting on media-dark geographies of the north Indian hinterland.

According to  Srishti, Spokesperson, Khabar Lahariya-

"Because the newspaper was not taking any ads, it was becoming difficult for them to sustain and also more and more people started consuming digital news, so in 2015, Khabar Lahariya became a completely digital platform and was taken up as a brand by a Delhi based media organisation called Chambal Media. Khabar Lahariya is still not taking any commercial ads. It relies on Chambal media, grants from Independent and Public Spirited Media Foundation and takes up projects of UNICEF and other organisations, helping them produce digital reading materials, awareness building projects and other such collaborations."

With an aim to train more rural women to become reporters, Khabar Lahariya is launching Chambal Academy in April this year, the organisation is also working towards recruiting more local women and those from underprivileged communities.

"Along with highlighting women’s issues and stories around women’s health, education, livelihood and domestic violence, Khabar Lahariya also covers issues related to forest rights, land, rivers, water, politics, communalism, crime, accidents, environmental issues."

“We do not leave anything. We cover as many things as we can and we try to do it better than others as we bring the local people’s perspective and feminist lens to our news coverage." -Ms Devi said.

Women reporters of Khabar Lahariya are breaking many barriers and stereotypes on a daily basis

Khabar Lahariya was initiated to complement the Sahajani Shiksha Kendra programme,

The programme  provides basic literacy training and educational support to rural women and girls by filling the information gap that previously existed in these hinterland rural areas.

The principal goal of the programme is to foster a culture of family or intergenerational reading among rural families, and promote most importantly, lifelong learning among rural women, through the production of a contextually relevant and gender-sensitive newspaper. The newspaper endeavours to eradicate illiteracy in the State by enhancing and sustaining the literacy skills of newly literate women and communities by:

-enabling women to learn skills in news gathering and production, thereby creating a pool of community-based female journalists skilled to produce and disseminate essential news and information to and about their communities

-raising women’s awareness of issues affecting their communities in general and women in particular, at a local or national level

-providing women with opportunities to articulate these issues which are particularly relevant to their lives

-providing low-cost news and information to women in areas with limited or no access to reading materials

-enabling women to participate more effectively in community and national development processes and make informed choices (civic education and gender empowerment)

-promote family literacy, intergenerational learning and community development.

Khabar Lahariya started i's journey as a printed newspaper in 2002

Oscar-nominated documentary 'Writing With Fire' shows the real story of this entirely woman led newspaper Khabar Lahariya,

Wrting With Fire' the only Indian documentary in the Oscar-2022 race, traces the journey of a vibrant community newspaper, Khabar Lahariya, from print to the digital world, directed by filmmakers Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh. It is the first Indian feature documentary to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Shot over five years, it is a story of determined journalists, some mothers and others single, and their commitment to press freedom.

Writing with Fire follows the three women as they first learn, and then train their teammates on going digital — scenes show them struggling to operate the video cameras on their new smartphones, and to edit. 

The women have grown up experiencing violence and discrimination When they report in the field, they mostly meet upper-caste men, who appear to tolerate them.

The film tracks them juggling domestic responsibilities and pressures, while commuting long distances to cover reports about illegal mining, rapes, murders, and interviewing police officers and politicians when Uttar Pradesh went to the polls in 2017.

Since its release at Sundance last year, where the film won two awards, Writing With Fire has received critical acclaim globally and bagged 28 international awards.

India's first newspaper run entirely by women, is a struggle against the rural-patriarchal society. As a digital news outlet, Khabar Lahariya is currently reaching over 10 million people. Currently, it has over 30 reporters out of whom about 18 are working in 14 districts of UP, some in 7 districts of MP and some in 2-3 districts of Bihar and Chattisgarh.

Initially, Khabar Lahariya mostly focused on women's issues but soon expanded its coverage of local politics, crime, social issues and entertainment.

As of now, the YouTube channel of the Khabar Lahariya site has over 500,000 subscribers.