Members Sally Howard and Geetanjali Krishna collaborate on cross-border global health reporting projects as The India Story Agency
Sally says:
Geetanjali Krishna and I met in Delhi in 2007. At the time, Geetanjali was writing a column for the Indian national newspaper Business Standard, People Like Them, which examined social and economic trends in rural India. I was fresh from a stint as a stringer in America, working as a roving reporter on human interest and social affairs beats.
One evening, while in Delhi on assignment, I had a review meal booked and decided — slightly on a whim — to post on Couchsurfing.com for someone to join me. This was the noughties, when the platform was still a curious early experiment in the sharing economy. I wasn’t looking for a couch for the night; I was looking for company to dine on ITC Maurya’s famous black dal with naan. Geetanjali answered the call.
At that dinner we became firm friends.
Over the following years I continued to specialise in reporting on India. In 2011–12, while I was researching my sociological travel book The Kama Sutra Diaries (Hachette), Geetanjai joined me on a series of field reporting trips. Together we travelled to Meghalaya in India’s far northeast to report on matrilineal communities there. On another journey we journeyed into Haryana to witness Lathmar Holi—the exuberant, slightly aggressive variation of the Holi festival in which women playfully strike men with sticks in a ritualised re-enactment tied to the legends of Krishna and Radha.
We stayed in touch over the years that followed. Then, in 2020, when the pandemic struck, we noticed an opening. Both of us had global reporting experience, yet many journalists were suddenly grounded and stories were going unreported. We began teaming up on reports, including a piece on the curious “Trump village” in India, where locals where locals worshipped the likeness of the American president.
Around the same time we were invited to commission global ecological stories for the social-enterprise forestry startup Sacred Groves. We began to commission young journalists for a series of solutions reports around ecological good news stories. By this point we were reporting similar beats: straddling social affairs, global health, humanitarian reporting and environmental storytelling.
Since then, as we’ve continued our independent work, our collaboration, now formalised as The India Story Agency, has evolved into something more deliberate: a way of reporting across borders, comparing perspectives, and telling stories that benefit from two vantage points and several media commissioning ecosystems rather than one. In 2022 we received Gates Foundation funding for a report on refugees and vaccine equity and in 2024 a second tranche for reporting around cold chain medical distribution technology in Rwanda. We also train journalists in solutions and cross-border reporting through our India Story Agency bi-annual mentorship programme: the next cohort for this will be women journalists based in Afghanistan who are keen to reach global audiences with their reporting on women’s lives under the new Taliban regime.
More recently, we have collaborated on a series of reports on the impact of war on Ukraine on the health of the Danube River basin and the human and ecological health downstream of these rivers in the Danube delta, a vital and fragile ecosystem only beginning to recover from the ravages of Soviet factory farming.
In an increasingly turbulent world, in which nations and border regimes are less hospitable to roving journalists, budgets are constrained and stories going untold, we like to think that through collaboration we’re more than the sum of our parts.
Geetanjali says:
Our collaboration began with both of us feeling isolated because of Covid, but five years down the road, I have come to see media partnerships like ours as a great way to expand one’s scope of work and benefit from each other’s unique skill sets.
In 2024, for example, when I was in the field in Rwanda, back home Sally, who is incredibly well networked, performed some quick magic to locate a trusted local stringer and other logistics. A story for The BMJ on a ten-country comparison on the effects of smoking bans would have been really hard if we had not pooled our research and data analytic skills. And last year, when we were together in Budapest, floating on boats made from plastic bottles in a trash collection contest that aims to raise awareness about plastic waste in the Danube, we were able to simultaneously write a quick news story for The BMJ about a plane that crashed into a hospital in Gujarat, India, by dipping into our shared network of contacts.
Collaboration, however, is much more than this. It is also more than simply representing two very different geographies. Multiple viewpoints, complementary skillsets and different ways of seeing add accountability, nuance and depth to our stories. And in today’s increasingly fraught media landscape, our partnership – and our mentorship programme – offers a safety net, a creative community and an alternative to the isolation that freelance journalists sometimes experience.
Geetanjali and Sally offer workshops in cross-border collaboration, storytelling in global health and securing humanitarian funding: indiastoryagency@gmail.com.
To apply for the September intake of The India Story Agency’s early career mentorship programme, email: indiastoryagency@gmail.com.