ON THE FRONTLINE

When a group of Dalit women in Uttar Pradesh created their newspaper in 2002, they were expected to fail. Instead, they stirred a revolution. Twenty years on, Khabar Lahariya continues to be India's only newspaper run entirely by women

- SRISHTI JASWAL

Meera Devi, the bureau Chief at Khabar Lahariya

Married at 14, Nazni Rizvi was a victim of an abusive marriage. Harassed by her husband and in-laws, she decided to cut all ties with them and focus instead on providing for her five children. Armed with only secondary school education, Rizvi had very few options to fall back on. But as fate would have it, she was directed to the Khabar Lahariya office in 2007, where she initially got the job of distributing and selling the newspaper to villagers after meeting with Kavita Bundelkhandi, the editor-in-chief and co-founder of the grassroots feminist news network, and Meera Devi, its managing editor.

Khabar Lahariya is India's only women-run ethical and independent rural news brand and results from a government literacy initiative, Mahila Samikhya Programme, under which adult education camps were set up in the 1990s. An outcome of that initiative was a four-page broadsheet called Mahila Dakiya, in which women wrote for themselves. It was supported by Nirantar Trust, a Delhi-based centre for Gender and Education. By 2002, Nirantar transformed the Mahila Dakiya experiment into a full-fledged newsroom, Khabar Lahariya, where women not just reported but edited, produced, and distributed the newspaper in neighbouring villages and towns, mostly on foot.

Today, it reaches five million people every month through multiple digital platforms. It has evolved from a chain of local language newspapers to a digital-only, rural news channel with 557k YouTube subscribers and an average of 10 million views every month across all social media platforms. It currently employs 20 women reporters and stringers across 12 districts of Uttar Pradesh and four districts of Madhya Pradesh.

While Bundelkhandi has been editing and publishing the weekly newspaper since its inception in 2002 from Chitrakoot, Uttar Pradesh, Devi joined her in 2006.

THE ORIGIN