Priyanka is an independent journalist from India, with nearly a decade of experience in the media industry focused on issues of social justice, gender, and inequality, and a PhD Candidate in Sociology and a Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge. She is also the author of ‘The Murderer, The Monarch and The Fakir: A New Investigation of Mahatma Gandhi's Assassination’, which was published by Harpercollins India in October 2020.
Prior to taking up her Atlantic Fellowship in 2017, Priyanka shifted gears from working at highly respected, mainstream print media groups such as The Hindu and the Indian Express to managing a hyper-local, women-driven and cash-strapped newspaper in the Bundelkhand region of Uttar Pradesh, India. She was also a co-editor of Local Diaries, a podcast that presents the stories of women in the Bundelkhand region in Uttar Pradesh and beyond.
She also served as Co-Editor and Programme Coordinator at Khabar Lahariya (“Waves of News”), a feminist news organisation run entirely by women, most of whom are semi-and-neo-literate, self-taught, Dalit, Adivasi and Muslim reporters, who produce a weekly newspaper and daily digital news in Hindi and local dialects. Its operations are based in one of the most backward regions of India, Bundelkhand, which comprises seven districts in Uttar Pradesh and six districts in Madhya Pradesh. The region, which fares extremely poorly on social and economic indicators, is also known as one of the two drought capitals in the country. Khabar Lahariya is read in 800-plus villages across this region in Bundeli, Awadhi and Hindi languages. Its readers are the farmers, migrant workers, community health workers, teachers, weavers and small entrepreneurs for whom development is designed, and for whom information is most important but scarce.
After her time at Khabar Lahariya, Priyanka started a collective of young women journalists focused on researching, reporting and writing on rural affairs, gender and social justice. Priyanka was also a member of a civil society delegation that visited Jammu & Kashmir and the co-author of a report documenting human rights violations in the Kashmir valley. She has researched spatial inequalities in access to nutrition programmes in Uttar Pradesh, and her reports have been published in Scroll.in, News Deeply, Indian Express, Jansatta (a Hindi daily) and TwoCircles.net (Hindi).
In 2018, as part of her Atlantic Fellowship, Priyanka completed an MSc in Inequalities and Social Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
What determines access to good healthcare, education and food security? What role do caste, gender and geography play in determining access to economic and social security for families? What are the inequalities that arise and how do they shape an individual’s life choices? In my journalism career, I have often found that inequality lies at the heart of uneven development and the life choices people make.Priyanka Kotamraju