Name of Fellow: Neetu Singh
Genre: Journalism
Area of Work: Uttar Pradesh
Neetu Singh is self-motivated and passionate journalist from Lucknow. With 10 years of on-the-job experience, she is highly enthusiastic about covering rural areas and issues and concerns of women, girls, farmers as well as agriculture crisis, rights of transgender people, sex workers, Adivasi communities, and HIV/AIDS infected persons. Impassioned about rural journalism, the 32-year-old woman journalist has started her own initiative to provide space to reportage from various remote areas.
As a woman journalist covering rural issues, she is working towards creating rural community journalists, especially from the girls. She conducts workshops to train the young people about the nuances of journalism. In these workshops, she devoted on session on the ideas of justice, equality, freedom and fraternity.
Neetu comes from Darhapur village in Kanpur Dehat district and she later moved to Ballia when her father shifted to the district due to his professional commitment.
When Neetu was 13 years old, her mother passed away leaving two younger sisters to bring them up. Eldest among three sisters, she had the responsibility to take care of the family as her father met with an accident when she was doing her secondary education. Though she was growing up under the care of her grandmother, she started to think of ways to contribute to the family so that her sisters can study. But due to her father’s accident and subsequent financial problems, her sisters could not study further.
Before her father met with the accident, he used to pursue his daughters to study higher education. During her schooling she was not able to sing, as girls used to do at her school. So Neetu’s father advised her to give speeches. During that time, she used to watch TV news bulletin and liked the anchors reading news. Her habit of giving speeches and liking towards the anchors, made her think that she should pursue this course. On the advice of a family friend she joined Kanpur university to do her master’s in mass communication.
This led her to join a community on a meagre pay where she worked for four years before moving to Lucknow. She started to cover rural news while she was working with a news website based out of the capital of Uttar Pradesh.
Here, she developed deep understanding of gender issues the rural women were facing. She started to health issues of women, Adivasi and minority rights issues and the hardships faced by women from interior villages.
Her work on the plight of poor rural people and their various issues gave her prominence and she devoted herself to their cause. In the process she won many awards for her rural reporting.
With 12 regional and national media awards in her feat for speaking truth to power about issue of women and rural affairs, her journalistic work speaks out loudly about the fierce commitment Ms. Singh has towards rural and women centric issues.
She hopes to create a network of community-journalist and train them in mobile journalism so the expensive affair of operating media organisation can be met without additional expenses as far as technology and equipments are concerned.
Her expertise includes reporting, production, podcast and audio editing.
Apart from her journalistic works, she is also associated with a non-profit organisation based out of Lucknow which to provide dignity to life to beggars and other oppressed groups.
Neetu is presently training a couple groups from Varanasi and Bhubaneshwar and had organized two training workshops.