2023
Jyoti Yadav
Entry type: Portfolio
Country/area: India
Publishing organisation: ThePrint
Organisation size: Big
Cover letter:
Award winning Indian journalist with 6 years of experience in reporting India’s most critical issues–unemployment, gender crimes, human rights, politics, and policy.
Born and brought up in a village in Haryana state, I fought my way out of the state’s stifling patriarchal set-up to reach the National Capital, becoming the first person to graduate in the family. During my college days at Delhi University, I learnt to wear the lens of English writers to examine the condition of Rural Women. In journalism, I wear both my rural and urban lenses to bring an element of critical intersectionality to my reporting and writing. Thus, I offer a rare, insider-outsider first-hand perspective on social, political, and cultural features.
I have travelled extensively in India covering investigative stories on gender, health, poverty, policies and politics. In 2020-21, my work focused on highlighting the human cost of Coronavirus in Small towns and rural India. In May 2020, I spent 25 days on the road covering India’s two populous states—UP and Bihar. During this period, I filed more than 15 ground reports on the plight of migrants walking home, quarantine centers, deliveries on highways, migrants who died in road accidents, etc. In the months of April and May 2021, I spent more than 60 days in the thick of deadly second waves covering mass cremations, queues at testing centers, collapsed, health infrastructure, underreported covid deaths, inside the covid wards, etc.
From August 2021 to December 2021, I again went to the deep pockets of the country to consistently report on the aftermath of the second covid wave. My ground dispatches focused on the gender gap in education, disrupted mid-day meals, drop-in institutional deliveries, suicides, mental health, etc.
The pandemic years brought to the surface– the social and economic injustice, apathy, intolerance, and deep-seated, systemic patriarchy again. It has shaken us out of the complacency that three decades of impressive GDP growth, urban boom, and global clout had lulled us into. It reinforced the unsettling idea that our nation-building and modernity project is still fragile.
I view my work and mission as a woman journalist as one making a critical intervention in this national journey.
Description of portfolio:
The human cost of India’s biggest defence reforms:
