- Innovators Project
Shubhranshu Choudhary: Giving a Voice to a Ravaged, Neglected Region
When the India-born BBC reporter went to cover conflict on his home turf, he realized that journalists were getting it wrong. The locals needed to tell the stories themselves.
As the South Asia producer for BBC TV and Radio during the 1990s and early 2000s, Shubhranshu Choudhary spent much of his time darting around the region covering wars and natural disasters, dropping into trouble spots—Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal, Kashmir, Afghanistan—interviewing local leaders, politicians, or NGO spokespersons, filing his story then moving on.
It was an exciting life, full of foreign travel, helicopters, and headline events, far removed from the rural coal-mining backwater in India's Chhattisgarh state (part of Madhya Pradesh state until 2000) where he grew up, attending the local tribal school, or his first job reporting for a Hindi-language newspaper in Chhattisgarh's capital, Raipur, and learning English by listening to BBC Radio at night. He was well respected, well
