In this column we will be featuring the writings by award winning women journalists in India found in the collection of the book ‘Making News Breaking News Her Way. It is a publication by Tranquebar Press in association with Media Foundation, New Delhi which instituted the annual Chameli Devi Jain Award for an Outstanding Women Mediaperson in 1980.
Usha Rai
REPORTING THAT MADE A DIFFERENCE
[dropcap]A[/dropcap]s one of the first women journalists in full-time reporting, I had to literally carve out a space for myself. Men dominated the newspaper in the 1960s. They were the editors, the special correspondents and reporters. Even the Desk in the newsroom was an all-male domain. Dirty jokes, foul language, rooms filled with cigarette smoke, endless cups of tea and the taka tak of the typewriters were the order of the day. Like crumbs thrown from the table, this happily slurping, still fresh-behind- the-ears, journalist was allowed to do flower shows and fashion shows. The men were not willing to allow this intruder from the female world to cover what they considered were the more serious beats and their prerogative -crime, Delhi University, Municipal Corporation, Delhi government and the local political parties.Just being in the newspaper was a heady experience, so I hung on and learnt about every variety of flower that bloomed in Delhi. The Rose Show, the Chrysanthemum Show, the flower shows and then the vegetable and mango shows became my annual pilgrimage, and people with green fingers who carried home trophies year after year, my contacts and friends. It was my learning curve -a learning that continues to this day.
I began covering The Times of India’s beauty pageants and interacted with Persis Khambhata, Zeenat Aman,Juhi Chawla, Yasmin Daji and several others before they became celebrities and glam queens. Fashion and beauty were not as ‘big’ then as they are today and there was no great elation in covering these events. The men in the reporting room spurned them so I was asked to do the rounds of the beauty pageants. It meant that I stayed up late in some five-star setting, then rushed off to gush and swoon on the front page of The Times of India.
But I loved my Delhi Zoo beat. I reported on the white tigers, the orangutans, the chimps that smoked cigarettes given to them by visitors or chucked their shit if visitors teased them. I reported on human cruelty as blades and stones were placed in the outstretched palms of monkeys asking for biscuits, on the man who jumped into the lion’s enclosure in a fit of madness, and the zoo director who was stung by a cobra. I campaigned for acquisition of long-necked giraffes from foreign zoos for Delhi and mourned when they died within months of their arrival.
It is my love for animals in the zoo that grew and extended to wildlife in national parks and tiger reserves fighting their battle for survival in a world dominated by humans and shrinking forest cover. I championed their cause. As my love for wildlife and nature grew, I began to understand and report on the bigger environment story.
I campaigned against the water-guzzling eucalyptus plantations, big dams that displaced people and mining projects that destroyed forests and left gaping holes in nature’s green spaces. Through my reportage, I struggled for a balance between man’s need and his greed. My initial coverage of the Delhi Zoo was my ladder to cover the Bruntland Commissions public hearings on environment in Sao Paulo, the Earth Summit in Rio and the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) meeting in Perth. My earnestness extended to my planting trees on Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg in front of newspaper offices. Initially people protested about trees taking up the inadequate space for parking cars. But when the trees grew tall and provided shade, the top bosses insisted that their cars alone could be parked under the trees!
Since I was the eager beaver of the team, I was sent off to report on the state of sarkari schools. Having gone to convents run by the missionaries, it was a shock to see children sitting on tat-patties (long floor mats) out in the open. I met a gaggle of teachers who, if they came to school, were busy knitting sweaters and scarves for husbands and children. Teaching and classroom work were clearly not their priorities. I travelled from school to school and trudged through the heat and dust till the sarkari school culture rocked my senses and I came out with a series of stories that I hoped shook the conscience of the smug, affluent Dilliwalas and those in the administration. They did have some impact, and they got me the Chameli Devi Jain Award for Excellence in Journalism.
Awards and recognition are great morale boosters and I delved deeper into the field of education. I began covering Delhi University, Jawaharlal Nehru University and, as I became a senior and was taken more seriously by the editors, I was allowed to cover the Ministry for Human Resource Development. The campus beat was extremely fruitful and I was competing for exclusive stories from the beat with colleagues in rival newspapers like The Statesman (yes, The Statesman was a great paper in the 1970s with its excellent features), the Hindustan Times and The Indian Express. I took a bus to the campus early every morning and went from the office of the Dean of Students and Dean of Colleges to meet student and teacher leaders. There were meetings in the coffee house of the University of Delhi and having lunch at the Tibetan dhabas was a treat.
Pushed into beats that my male colleagues did not want to do, I learnt to specialise in education, women and children, health, grassroots movements and, of course, environment. Since there were hardly any stories on social issues in newspapers, what I wrote seemed different and got me excellent space, often on the front page. My interest and half- baked knowledge on education, earned me a trip to jomtien, Thailand, for the World Conference on Education.
Shortly thereafter, I got the opportunity to work with the Times Education Supplement of The London Times on second ment for close to three months. It was a wonderful experience. They announced my presence as if I was a VIP and allowed me to travel across Britain writing on education issues of the ethnic minorities. I travelled to Southall, Bradford and Birmingham visiting education institutions for the minorities and talking to teachers, parents and policy makers. Unlike in India, I was given an entertainment allowance to wine and dine my contacts and news sources. The response from the academic community to my stories was good and before I left, I was asked to contribute to the popular, prestigious column on the last page of the Supplement. I focused on the educational opportunities available in the schools in UK vis-a- vis those in India. I wrote about the difficulties in accessing education in the smaller towns and rural areas of India, the “lack of facilities in classrooms and the Indian middle class’ craving for education. I wrote about the erstwhile Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri who, as a child, swam across the river Ganga With a bundle of books on his head to get to school.
I had gone to Britain when my morale was at an all-time low after a divorce that had left me with the responsibility of bringing up two very young children. But I bounced back with my confidence soaring. Having shown my editors how serious I was about journalism, I was allowed to investigate, travel and write. But my stories were always a little offbeat – about the underdog, the poor, women, children and health. When I reported on the thresher accidents that left men, women and children maimed -sometimes without hands, an arm or fingers, The Times of lndia carried the story on its front page. This encouraged me to investigate further into the reason behind these accidents and I found that it was due to the absence of a safety device on the threshers. Added to that was the fact that the farmers worked the threshers depending on the power situation, which often meant them working at odd hours of the night, in a tired or sleepy state, making them vulnerable to accidents. The series of stories on this issue led to agricultural and design institutes coming out with inbuilt safety devices on threshers. After a public interest litigation in the Supreme Court, it was decided to extend the compensation given to industrial accidents to those happening in the agriculture sector.
My contacts in the environment field were strong and reliable but when a story breaks there pulls and pressures on the journalist. I remember doing a story on how the Russian funding during Gorbachov’s visit to India was diverted to the Tehri hydel project because, after the Chernobyl nuclear plant accident, it would have been embarrassing nuclear power. It was the second lead in the TOI. I was summoned by the Russian and browbeaten by the officials of the Ministry of Water Resources to reveal my sources. Though I held my ground, I was rattle to the point that I almost met with an accident while trying to cross a road.
In another incident, the field director of Corbett National Park informed me that the powerful Thapar boys were flying in a helicopter low over the park and shooting animals from the air with crossbows. Their helicopter had even crashed in the area. Because they were rich and powerful, he did not want to be quoted on the story. One of the Thapar boys, along with an official from his company, visited the editor and tried to ensure there would be no follow-up to the damaging front-page story. Fortunately, the editor stood by my story, and the Ministry of Environment and Forest followed up with investigations.
In another case, the setting up of an industrial plant close to the Ranthambore Tiger Reserve was stopped after a newspaper campaign exposed that the plant was violating environmental guidelines and would destroy the park. Rajiv Gandhi, who was then prime minister and extremely fond of nature parks and wildlife, personally stopped the setting up of the plant. Spearheading the campaign against the plant were the young nature activists belonging to the environmental action group, Kalpavriksh.
However, one was not able to stop the denotification of a wildlife sanctuary in Himachal Pradesh for building a cement plant. Obviously, a lot of money had been used to grease palms to set up the plant. Denotification was justified on the, ground that there was no noticeable wildlife in the sanctuary. No one questioned where the existing wildlife and rare birds of the sanctuary had disappeared or why the sanctuary was not developed. Representatives of the cement factory did visit me at home to plead that I should not write more on the subject. The story broke too late to stop the denotification, but it did alert activists for the need to be more vigilant in guarding protected areas.
The impact of the Mathura Refinery and the 250 iron foundries of Agra on the Taj Mahal, was reported in a sustained manner. The high content of sulphur dioxide in the atmosphere and the rusting iron pins inside the marble of the Taj were causing ugly pockmarks on the serene and beautiful face of the monument. A PIL was filed in the Supreme Court on the basis of the stories and the iron foundries were shifted out. To protect the monument from fuel emissions, trucks, buses and other big vehicles had to bypass Agra.
Having won recognition for writing on social issues, when The Indian Express hired me, I bargained and got the job of development editor. Every Wednesday, the entire op-ed page was devoted to development and it was carried simultaneously in all seventeen editions of the Express -this was before the break-up of the newspaper into southern and northern editions. The development page ran for four years because it had the backing of the proprietor, Vivek Goenka. However, several people were upset about an entire page being devoted to development. Then, to accommodate stories on the World Cup, it was reduced to a column!
After thirty-odd years as a reporter in mainline newspapers, I joined the NGO sector to get their perspective on development. I worked with the Tiger Conservation Cell of the Worldwide Fund for India as their communication person. I was involved in making television spots on tiger conservation, and in the campaign to save tigers from being poisoned in Corbett and other protected areas. It was a great learning experience for the journalist who began her adventure on the nature trail, reporting on caged animals and birds of the Delhi Zoo.
Having moved out of mainstream journalism, I now freelance and do advocacy work on development issues. I brought out a manual, reporting on HIV and AIDS and the social stigma and discrimination of those affected, for UNDP and the Population Foundation of India. Subsequently, I helped the Press Council of India change its guidelines on the reporting on HIV and AIDS. I have written on the status of widows in Vrindavan for the Guild for Service with support from the United Nations Fund for Women. My involvement in the campaigns on the pollution threats to the Taj Mahal got me the opportunity to write the text for a coffee table book on the monument.
This is my golden jubilee year in journalism. I have enjoyed every moment of it and I still get a thrill when I meet someone who says, ‘So you are Usha Rai -we remember the story you wrote about us.’ My only regret is that development journalism has not got the place it deserves and the divide between the haves and have-nots has only widened!
Usha Rai is a veteran journalist and pioneer in writing on environment and development issues. She has worked for over thirty-five years with leading Indian newspapers –The Times of India, The Indian Express and the Hindustan Times. “For five years from 2000, she was Deputy Director, Press Institute of India, and brought out a manual on human rights reporting in the country. She is now a media and communication consultant and continues to freelance. Usha Rai has brought out several publications for NGOs and the UN. In 1990, Usha Rai won the Chameli Devi Jain Award. She shared the award with Shiraz Sidhwa.
