jyoti yadav
Jyoti Yadav has been a journalist for nearly a decade now, based in New Delhi, India. Most of these years have been as a feisty, fearless ground reporter at ThePrint, where she captures the social shifts that lurk unnoticed beneath breathless breaking news cycles, establishing herself as a formidable long-form writer. She is a relentless chronicler of rural and small-town India at a time when journalism has shifted its focus to big cities and metropolitan urbanism.
Born and brought up in a village in Haryana, she has fought her way out of the state’s stifling patriarchal setup to reach the National Capital, becoming the first person in her agrarian family to graduate and pursue postgraduate studies. Women in oppressive societies do not just need any job; they need jobs where they can express themselves. That is why she chose journalism as her career.
She wears both her rural and urban lenses to bring an element of critical intersectionality to her reporting and writing. She offers a rare insider-outsider perspective on social, political, and cultural features.
Over the years, she has played a pivotal role in covering the COVID-induced migrant exodus, the deadly second wave, the aftermath of the pandemic, gang rapes, and other critical indicators of contemporary India’s struggles with injustice, oppression, and violence faced by women, minorities, and the working class.
The past few years have brought to the surface the social and economic injustice, apathy, intolerance, and deep-seated systemic patriarchy once again. It has shaken us out of the complacency that three decades of impressive GDP growth, urban boom, and global clout had lulled us into. It has reinforced the unsettling idea that our nation-building and modernity project is still fragile.
She views her work and mission as a woman journalist as one of making a critical intervention in this national journey.
For her work, she has been awarded a dozen national and international honours, including the prestigious Ramnath Goenka Award 2020, Journalist of the Year 2023 by IIMC, Young Journalist of the Year by the Thomson Foundation 2022, The Statesman Award for Rural Reporting 2023, True Story Award 2024, International Press Institute (IPI) Award 2022, and the UN Laadli Media Award for three consecutive years (2020, 21, 22).