Name of Fellow: Imtiyaz Ahmed
Genre: Journalism
Area of Work: Madiyaanv, Kamlapur, Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh
Imtiayz Ahmed is a young journalist based out of Lucknow. He has been working as a reporter for a decade now.
Though he is political reporter, he covers violation of rights, discrimination and communal harmony. He also runs a campaign to create communal harmony in his small township near Lucknow where community members from Hindus and Muslims get together and discuss their issues with each other at a madrassa.
Coming from a small town and without much educational background, Imtiyaz is the first person from the area to complete journalism diploma from India’s premier mass communication school, Indian Institute of Mass Communication.
While growing up with four siblings, the eldest one encouraged him to pursue higher studies. But he lost his brother in 2009 which impacted him a lot. His brother was close to social issues and contributed to the society by helping people in distress. As he wanted to continue his legacy and help the people, he thought of pursuing journalism as a career option. In the process, his father also taught him the values of justice and fairness, which are important values Imtiyaz.
While most of news organisations provide greater space to ruling sides, Imtiyaz believes that fact-based oppositional views should also be given equal space in news outlets. He covers extensively on opposition’s views on matters related to public policy, human rights and also health issues.
During the fellowship programme Imtiyaz intends work with community members and build capacity of migrant labours about their Constitutional rights. By connecting with the community members, he would identify those community members who can assert their voices in their respective families. In this way, he intends to create community-based volunteers who would disseminate the Constitutional values in their localities and thus spread the values of the Constitution.
He has been engaging with students from madrassas and Hindu community members to sensitise them about secular values. Owning to the growing distrust between the two communities, he is working towards spreading communal harmony through community engagement. In his meetings with people, they discuss on issues such as secularism, community polarisation for vote bank politics, common threads among the community members and other social causes.
These meetings are organised at regular intervals so that people would remember the issues discussed in the previous sessions. His effort to regularly organise the discussions on the Constitutional values and communal harmony has led the community members to appreciate Imtiyaz.