2015

Correspondent, India,  BBC

Reporting sexual violence in India  Judge

Divya Arya is an India based correspondent with the BBC reporting for its television, radio and web platforms in English and Hindi. She has focused her journalism on exploring human rights issues with a specific concentration on gender for more than a decade. In recent years, she has written about why the Indian state with one of the highest levels of education for women also has the highest cases of reported rape, the largest Muslim ghetto to have come up in the Indian State of Gujarat that witnessed a communal pogrom in 2002, women illegally employed as manual scavengers to clean human excreta, landless farmers reduced to daily wage laborers as land is acquired for industrial development and victims of false cases of terrorism. She believes, that whether she is reporting on women, about women or otherwise, all her reports are informed by ‘journalism as if gender matters.’ Over the last few years, she has been invited to speak on gender discrimination in the news industry. She was also part of the Indian Government’s National Consultation on Women and Media this year, an exercise aimed at formulating the government’s new policy on women.