BHUBANESWAR: Even as India continues to rise as a global power, two senior women journalists said rural communities continue to face real problems and challenges which must be addressed to ensure the overall development of the country.
Speaking at Odisha Literary Festival-2024 on ‘Lapataa Stories: Amplifying Unheard Voices’, managing director of social media channel ‘Khabar Lahariya’ Meera Devi said poverty, low literacy rate, lack of basic infrastructure like schools and hospitals, gender inequality and other issues continue to prevail in rural areas.
Devi, a native of Uttar Pradesh’s Banda district, said when she joined the vernacular daily Khabar Lahariya as a stringer in 2006, she received a very cold response from government officials for raising the issues of people. “The newspaper had only women staff and we continued to work diligently. Gradually, the government officials started taking us very seriously,” she said.
In rural areas, gender discrimination also persisted. Parents were reluctant to send their daughters to work as journalists or for that matter in any other sector. However, women representation has increased in every field now. There has been a sea change but a lot more needs to be done for the development of rural communities, she said and urged young journalists to report the various problems faced by people staying in villages.
Khabar Lahariya was discontinued in 2015 and later its YouTube channel was launched the same year. Devi assumed the role of the channel’s managing director in 2019.
Another senior journalist and founder of social media channel ‘Mooknayak’, Meena Kotwal expressed similar views and said there are many issues plaguing the rural populace of the country including casteism.
“I was employed with an international media house in New Delhi between 2017 and 2019. Despite working in the national capital, the employees harassed me in a very subtle manner because of my caste. I resigned and started working as a freelancer to highlight various issues faced by the people in rural areas. During 2019 Bihar elections, I went to my in-laws’ house in Motihari and posted articles related to discrimination against dalits on my social media accounts,” she said.
