Kavita Bundelkhandi couldn’t see the sea in Mumbai. 

“Dikh nahin raha hai,” she quipped onstage at the Shashi Baliga Memorial Session at the Godrej Literature Live! festival at The National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) in Mumbai on 25th October 2026. It was a fitting comment for the day, both because of Mumbai’s rising AQI and as a reminder that a journalist is always on the lookout for a good story. This insistence on practising on-the-ground journalism despite social, political and personal challenges was the theme at the launch of “The Good Reporter,” a collective biography of the feminist grassroots news organisation, Khabar Lahariya. The launch was followed by a conversation between Kavita Bundelkhandi, editor-in-chief and co-founder of Khabar Lahariya, and Harinder Baweja, journalist and author with decades of experience in conflict reporting, moderated by Faye D’Souza, founder and editor of Beatroot News. 

The afternoon’s discussion was centred on one question: how does a working woman reporter navigate a tough assignment? It’s a question that merits scrutiny of the adjectives in that sentence. Does the gender of a reporter influence the story being reported? A “tough” assignment might be a story from a social and geographical terrain that’s conventionally male-dominated. But what if an all-women news organisation breaks that perception? 

The conversation began with the origin story of Khabar Lahariya. The organisation was started in Chitrakoot in Uttar Pradesh in 2002. Nearly twenty-five years later, it has expanded from a print newspaper to a video-first digital network. It employs an all-women team of reporters, from Dalit, tribal, Muslim and oppressed castes, across districts in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar. These women report on the contexts they live in and know deeply, and in doing so highlight the lack of accountability in rural governance. “Khabar Lahariya began as an answer to a challenge. Why should only men who are upper caste or speak English run a newspaper? That was a laxman rekha for us,” said Bundelkhandi, describing the trigger that led her to co-found Khabar Lahariya, then an eight-page weekly newspaper, with Meera Devi. 

The thrill of taking on a challenge was also the impetus for a young journalist who packed her bags to go on a dangerous assignment nearly two decades earlier. Harinder Baweja was a cub reporter at the Sunday Observer when she covered Operation Blue Star at the Golden Temple in Amritsar in 1984. In the years since, Baweja has become a legend in Indian journalism and is often described as “fearless.” But it’s a word she rejects. “I was not fearless, but journalism itself was fearless. It wasn’t a career, it was a passion for me. I was interested in finding not the echoes of gunfire, but the tremors that exist within communities,” Baweja said. 

Baweja saw the unmistakable scars of violence at the Golden Temple, the holiest shrine in Sikhism. Witnessing that violence and the anti-Sikh riots in Delhi soon after had an impact on her both personally and professionally. When you’re a woman reporting on the ground on incidents marked by violence and death, how do you keep the personal and the professional separate? “The impact stays,” was Bundelkhandi’s response. “In cases of murder, when we report, we are told women are not allowed in the postmortem house. We don’t go out of bravery, but because we have to. We tell our colleagues how to steady yourself when you go to the burn ward or when you see a case of death due to dowry or domestic violence. Despite that, the impact stays.” 

“Kahin na kahin woh gussa foota hai.” The anger bursts out inevitably. 

It was an acknowledgement that the body remembers the cost of personal risk and the aftermath of violence long after the events have passed. Speaking about her experience of writing “The Good Reporter,” Bundelkhandi said she learned of some of the harassment her reporters had endured only while writing the book. They laughed about it, but the memory remained. Baweja also felt the aftereffects of reporting on conflict, first in Punjab and then in Kashmir. She said, “Journalists are not very well equipped to deal with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It’s good to have fire in your belly, but it takes a toll.”

Fire in the belly, check. Preparing for the job to take a toll, check. What else does a young journalist need to enter the field in 2026? The advice onstage was brief, and doubled as a commentary on the shrinking space in Indian journalism to hold power to account. Baweja placed the burden of choosing good journalism on the reader and said, “Attention span is the commodity that’s being sold. So starve bad journalism of attention.” For Bundelkhandi, social media emerged as a democratising space. “The reel makers are the news makers. You think of what kind of journalism you want to do,” she said.

“If there is a drain next to you that’s filthy, will you show it as positive news?” she asked the audience. The vanishing sea might have agreed.