International Development Journalism Competition: New writers, new readers, newspapers
"We are 21 patients of tuberculosis. 8 have died and the rest are waiting in line," cries a villager to Shanti. Shanti, a reporter from Khabar Lahariya, has walked for over eight kilometres in the heat through mud and thicket to reach Sukhrampur, a blighted North Indian village of 600 with no doctors, transport facilities, or even a post office.
The villager points to his wife, shrivelled on a rope bed. "In two or three days she too will die. I'm the most cursed man in this village." For the people of Sukhrampur, one of India's poorest villages, Khabar Lahariya is an unlikely vehicle to shine a spotlight on their forgotten home.
Khabar Lahariya, or News Waves, is an eight-page weekly newspaper produced by a group of poor women at the bottom of the caste pyramid. In the North Indian district of Chitrakoot, rife with violence against women and lower castes, corruption, and land policies that reinforce poverty, thirty newly literate women gather everyday to produce the newspaper, writing articles, illustrating it by hand, and delivering it to be printed.
Among this group is Shanti, married at six, forced to become a mother while still a teenager, and now, at 47, already a feisty grandmother of six. It was only in her thirties that Shanti had the courage to learn to read and write. Though she continues to struggle with her literacy, Shanti has no shortage of grit when it comes to marketing the paper. She travels alone into the late hours of the night, hawking the newspaper in the trains, bazaars, and crooked by-lanes of the 250 villages the paper reaches. "I like being on the move," she says. "Otherwise the day weighs heavy on me."
Each of the women on the Khabar Lahariya team has subverted "the existing gender stereotype," says Shalini Joshi, the co-director of Nirantar, the local organization that facilitated the launch of the newspaper. "Existing journalists are the upper-caste, more literate men. You don't see many women in this profession, especially in rural areas."
Nirantar conceived of the project in 2002 and provided extensive training, editorial support, and a salary to the women. "We felt this was a new, innovative way to support women in their strides towards literacy and give them a platform that would remain forever," Joshi says.
Working on the newspaper has its share of dangers, Meera, one of the reporters at Khabar Lahariya, points out.
"Sometimes we land up fighting with members of political parties," she says. "Once, a man removed his pistol and said, 'see I have a pistol and will come with a couple of people to your office'."
Yet the women refuse to be cowed. "There is a lot of pressure on us from people like this but we are not afraid," Meera says. "We print what the truth is."
"If any minister goes anywhere and any accident takes place it's all over the media," adds Shanti. "But they never write about the state of our villages." Shanti's coverage of the tuberculosis outbreak in Sukhrampur resulted in the villagers receiving free treatment from the nearest hospital for six months.
In addition to providing a forum for local issues, Khabar Lahariya provides information about regional and national policies that impact the poor, and exposes contentious issues such as domestic violence and the misuse of development funds to public scrutiny. It also captures the pulse of Bundeli, the local dialect, and is written in a simple style that enables it to be heard and understood even by the illiterate.
Over 60 years after independence, a third of India's population is unable to read. The illiteracy rate is particularly high in rural areas, among women and people of lower castes. In Uttar Pradesh, the state in which Chitrakoot lies, merely 42 percent of females are literate, compared to 69 percent of males. Yet even when they are literate, rural people have little access to print media, which remains primarily urban in scope.
The promotion of gender equality and empowerment remains one of the key Millennium Development Goals and, according to a 2010 UNIFEM-UNDP report, it is the precondition for sustainable growth and poverty reduction. Empowering women leads to better child and maternal health, favours girls access to education and improves the well-being of families and communities.
However, over the last ten years, "empowerment has become an all embracing buzz word," warns Andrea Cornwall, professor at the Institute for Development Studies and director of Pathways of Empowerment, an international research programme working to advance women's empowerment. Cornwall believes that there has been an unfortunate tendency to view empowerment as a "magical recipe."
"Empowerment is not a destination that is reached once and for all time," says Cornwall. A woman might be empowered in one sphere, but disempowered in another. What is empowering for one woman might be disempowering for another and this can change over time. In Cornwall's view, it is necessary to go beyond stereotypes and recognize that empowerment is a journey without maps. Empowerment, Cornwall says, is about "shifting the boundaries of the possible and shifting the boundaries of action."
It is precisely this expansion of the possible that is the hallmark of Khabar Lahariya's success. One of the ways this has been achieved is through honouring individual skills and local knowledge, Nirantar's Joshi says. For instance, although Shanti's literacy skills are comparatively poor, she has a talent for unearthing stories that "no other person on the team can offer," Joshi says.
Today Khabar Lahariya has two editions and a weekly readership of over 25,000 people. In the dusty village squares of Chitrakoot, it has gained the affection of the local people as a paper that speaks in their voice.
"When the train comes with Khabar Lahariya, I jump up and start reading it," exclaims a neighbourhood street vendor. "It's printed in our own language. Many papers come here in other languages, but we don't get the same pleasure in reading them."

This feature was written for the Guardian International Development Journalism competition before 13 June 2011.