Ink and Impact: How investigative journalism is highlighting women’s empowerment

As an independent journalist, she has reported on a variety of subjects from different parts of India, Germany, and Bangladesh. Her journalistic work has been supported by grants from the European Journalism Centre, Dart Centre at Columbia University, and the Robert Bosch Foundation. Meet Sunaina Kumar. Her project focused on the role of self-help groups in India and their connection with the political and social empowerment of rural women and made it possible for her to receive the Svran-Apeejay Journalism Foundation (SAJF) grant.

These grants empower journalists to deeply investigate and produce extensive stories that highlight the positive aspects of India and its regions across various media platforms, including print, digital, and video. In a candid interview, she talks about an impactful story and the research that went into the project.

What drew you to explore the role of self-help groups in India, particularly about the political and social empowerment of rural women?

As most reporters discover, stories have a way of finding you when you’re looking for something else. My interest in self-help groups started when I realized that every time I was in a village in rural India and looking to talk to women, I was directed to talk to a didi of the village, a woman who was a member of a self-help group. She would always have the qualities of a leader, the confidence to talk on issues of governance and politics, and could very quickly gather other women from the village. In those years I was traveling to areas that are traditionally patriarchal like western Uttar Pradesh, interiors of Madhya Pradesh and Haryana, where women do not step out of their homes. It did not take long to realise that the only way that women in these places can find empowerment is by collectivising in these groups.

These groups bring women together for savings but their social and political impact is far greater than the financial impact. Soon I was researching more and more on the policy aspects of how women in India were mobilised to join the National Rural Livelihoods Project.

What have been some of the most significant challenges you faced and how did you overcome them?

Since self-help groups are ubiquitous in the country and women in these groups are generally used to being in the public sphere, I would not say I faced a challenge in the field. In the background research, the challenge arose in finding qualitative studies and data, while there is a lot of quantitative data available on the numbers of women in these groups in all districts of the country, there is less research on the many immeasurable ways this intervention has impacted and changed the lives of women in India.  

Could you share a particularly impactful story?

There are so many interesting and innovative ways that self-help groups affect the lives of women and rural communities, beyond their mandate of savings and credit access. These groups were among the first responders during the onset of the pandemic, the women were at the frontlines of the COVID-19 response, from running information campaigns to producing masks, and sanitisers, running community kitchens for migrant workers who returned to villages, providing access to cash transfers for relief packages and organising vaccination drives. 

How did you approach your research for this project?

It was a mixed approach, based on my experiences as a journalist and a public policy professional. I drew from my observations on the field, and secondary literature, including research articles and news reports. I also interviewed women in self-help groups, representatives from civil society organisations and officials, and bureaucrats who have worked on NRLM.

Role of journalism in influencing public perceptions and policies regarding women’s empowerment in India.

Journalism works best when it shows rather than tells. We need to have grants like SAJF and newsrooms that are willing to send reporters to the field and put their money where their mouths are so that the story of women can be brought out. We are not closing the gender gap anytime soon in India, and until then journalism’s focus on gender will be extremely relevant. 

What future trends do you foresee for self-help groups in India?

Self-help groups have proved to be indispensable in the country. I would like to track the expansion of self-help groups in urban areas, as the focus so far has greatly been on rural areas. But there are women in these groups in cities working on things like urban governance and looking for solutions on health, climate, on waste management, which are all very interesting.  

Advice would you give to young journalists who are interested in pursuing long-form, investigative journalism

Development reporting can be an exciting beat in India. One of the things I discovered that worked for me in development reporting was to not just look for problems, but also point towards the solution. What are the ideas and models that work, how can they be scaled up, and what are the gaps in implementation? Look at an issue from the bottom up (how it impacts people on the ground for which reporting is a good tool) but also investigate it top-down (how has the policy been implemented, who are the stakeholders) and then correlate the two.

 How did the SAJF grant help your cause?

The SAJF grant was very generous and supportive at a critical stage in my career as an independent journalist and then as I made the transition to public policy research. First, there is almost complete independence given to reporters to work on the story and not retrofit it into any pre-decided shape or mould. The grant allowed me the flexibility to explore this topic and it was the starting point for something that has stayed with me. I have explored the role of self-help groups in India through reporting, and research, in a podcast and talked about it at an international convening. 

I recently did a piece on the role of self-help groups in closing the gender gap in voting in India and how the Election Commission has worked with them to get more women to vote. There are endless possibilities to explore and I see myself working on this for a long time.