Name of Fellow: Anand Dutta
Genre: Journalism
Area of Work: Ranchi, Jharkhand
Anand Dutta is a journalist working out of Ranchi Jharkhand. He has worked with various national platforms as a reporter from 2009 till 2018 before taking up independent journalism. As a journalist, he covers ground stories concerning Adivasis, Adivasi rights, human rights, and sports.
While growing up in a joint family at Ranti village in Madhubani district of Bihar, he saw his elder brothers preparing for competitive exams. For which they would read the daily newspapers, listen to radio news every day and read various magazines. Seeing this, he started to follow his brothers and developed the habit of reading newspaper and stay connected to news every time from an early age. Reading newspaper and learning new developments also made it easier to write fluently.
This habit eventually led him to pursue journalism though he had no known person working in the sector. In his more than 10 years of professional journalism career, he has covered he has worked with Dainik Jagaran, Prabhat Khabar, and Hindustan newspaper and Firstpost news website. To pursue journalism, he joined Indian Institute of Mass Communication and started working from Bihar as a young reporter.
However, when he moved to Ranchi, he saw ground stories of Adivasis and their rights violation. This led him to pursue Adivasi issue-based reporting. In the process he extensively covered the Maoist and security forces clashes.
Since giving up fulltime work, he has been regularly contributing to prominent news organisations such as the Print Hindi, The Wire, Down to Earth, News Laundry, The Quint, and BBC Hindi among others.
As an alumnus of IIMC, he also received the best sport journalist’s award in 2020 and he was also a reporting fellow with National Foundation for India. During the fellowship, he covered Adivasi issues and education.
He intends to train young Adivasi boys and girls about the nuances of journalism so that they can highlight their own issues through various platforms. He intends to train at least 10 journalists during the course of the fellowship programme who will be skilled in highlighting the Constitutional values in their works.
In this effort, he has visited journalism institutes and colleges for recruitment of tribal students for the training programme. He has also tie-up with Ranchi Press Club to speed up enrolment in the programme to create tribal journalists. He believes that as Adivasi representation in journalism remain negligible, their issues get minimum coverage. To change this he intends to create a pool of Adivasi community reporters.
Growing up in a village, he was interested in social issues from his childhood. He contributed in the outbreak of encephalitis in Muzaffarpur district through generating financial help for the poor people and supplied medical assistance.