Neelam Pandey, ThePrint

2022

Country/area: India

Organisation: ThePrint

Organisation size: Big

Cover letter:

I am a Delhi based reporter with over 15 years of experience, currently working with a digital platform, ThePrint in New Delhi. As the second wave of Covid-19 hit India, ThePrint decided to take stock of the healthcare situation in the southern parts of India while focusing on data. I was willing to undertake the task (with all safety measures in place) despite the fact that I had not received my double dose of vaccination as I wanted to bring out the real picture. ThePrint is also one of the very few organisations that sent their reporters across the country to report on the pandemic.

Also, this is not the first time that I had ventured out to cover human interest stories amidst the pandemic. My organisation — ThePrint — had sent me on a special 16-day assignment to report from the ground how Uttar Pradesh and Bihar are dealing with the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 too. I travelled over 3000 kms from Delhi to Uttar Pradesh and covered Bihar too. During this period not only was travelling next to impossible the fact that everything was shut meant requesting people to allow us to use their washrooms! In my 15 years of journalism I have covered a variety of topics from homelessness, civic journalism, women safety, child labour, politics, education, crime and the list goes on.

Before joining ThPrint, I worked as a Senior Assistant Editor with Hindustan Times for ten years. In my 15 years in journalism, I have also covered politics, and policy apart from writing on various other social issues concentrating on women and children.

I was recently awarded a PhD from Jamia Millia Islamia on Feminist and Dalit Publishing Houses. I was also a part of “The Economist” newsroom as a 2015 Chevening Fellow, London.

I completed my Masters and Bachelors in English (Hons) from Jamia Millia Islamia and Delhi University post which I pursued MPhil in English Literature. I was awarded the Ramnath Goenka’s “The Prakash Kardaley memorial award for civic journalism” (awarded to team HT) for coverage of the Commonwealth Games in 2010 and was also the recipient of Shreshtha Award for reporting on homeless in Delhi from the “Indo Global Social Service Society, a non-profit organization.

There were many challenges that I faced while covering these stories. At the same time, these stories were done at a time most mainstream media were reluctant in travelling to far-flung areas.

As a lockdown had been imposed in the state, right from finding hotels and cabs was a difficult task. As a journalist I wanted to focus on the rural areas armed with data, something which was being ignored by the mainstream that focussed largely on the cities. Wearing double masks and shields, it was quite a task to travel in the interiors and get information as many restrictions on travel were imposed by the government too. From visiting villages, crematoriums, hospitals, primary healthcare centres, the project involved focusing on numbers so that we could let data speak for itself. The hardest part of the project was to witness death, devastation and grimness all around and still focus on collecting data claad in a PPE kit. Equally difficult was to visit the hospitals at a time where the risk of contracting Covid-19 was the highest.

I strongly believe that the stories that I have covered helped in shifting the focus on the rural areas.

Description of portfolio:

This project was carried out at a time when India was battling the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic which was much more devastating than the first wave. ThePrint decided to take stock of the healthcare situation in the southern parts of India while focusing on data. The country was facing an immense shortage of hospital beds, medicines and even oxygen. This was a time when non-essential traveling had almost come to a halt.

While vaccination had started, journalists were not included under the essential workers and hence I was not vaccinated when I was asked to undertake this project. As I chalked out the plan to cover the rural areas in Karnataka which was witnessing a huge spike in cases I managed to get the first dose. A number of doctors had then advised not to travel immediately after getting the first dose of the vaccine. But I did. As a lockdown had been imposed in the state, right from finding hotels and cabs was a difficult task. As a journalist I wanted to focus on the rural areas armed with data, something which was being ignored by the mainstream that focussed largely on the cities. Wearing double masks and shields, it was quite a task to travel in the interiors and get information as many restrictions on travel were imposed by the government too. From visiting villages, crematoriums, hospitals, primary healthcare centres, the project involved focusing on numbers so that we could let data speak for itself. The hardest part of the project was to witness death, devastation and grimness all around and still focus on collecting data claad in a PPE kit. Equally difficult was to visit the hospitals at a time where the risk of contracting Covid-19 was the highest.

The Karnataka government’s handling of the Covid-19 spread at Hallegere village in Mandya was an unflattering microcosm of its efforts in tackling the pandemic in rural areas where cases were surging. The government had simply reduced testing. The health centre we visited used to conduct 200-300 tests every week in April but was reduced to 50-60 in a week in May.

All the stories that have been submitted from Karanatka were reported by me with photographs from Praveen Jain.

We visited a particular hospital in Mandya district for another story where an acute staff crunch had led to relatives being forced to tend to Covid-19 patients admitted at the state-run Mandya Institute of Medical Sciences in Mandya, Karnataka. When ThePrint visited the hospital on 14 May, there were around 54 patients admitted in three of the several Covid-19 wards. But each patient had an attendant right beside them, in clear violation of all Covid-19 treatment protocols. The fact that this was the state of affairs of hospitals in the south too, was quite alarming.

We had to make rounds of the healthcare centres and hospitals to collect data manually. However, to ensure the data was analysed properly it used to be fed into our excel sheets. At the same time, mobile phones were used to shoot videos to show the current situation. This was important as it also served as evidence of our ground work in case of any dispute.