Your podcast discovery platform
Curious minds select the most fascinating podcasts from around the world. Discover hand-piqd audio recommendations on your favorite topics.
piqer for: Climate and Environment Globalization and politics
Raksha Kumar is a multimedia journalist focusing on human rights, politics and social injustices. Since 2011, she has reported for The New York Times, BBC, Guardian, TIME, South China Morning Post, Foreign Policy, Scroll.in and The Hindu.
In March 2018, she was awarded the National Foundation for India Media Award for her reportage on land rights in India. In 2017, she was shortlisted for Kurt Schork Memorial Awards in International Journalism. For her work on land conflicts in India, she was awarded the Chameli Devi Award for Outstanding Media Personality in 2016.
As a reporter, her focus areas are land and forest rights of the most vulnerable communities. However, since these issues cannot be looked at in isolation, Raksha found herself increasingly reporting on armed conflict around resource extraction in places like Chhattisgarh and Kashmir.
In 2015, she wrote, shot and directed a documentary film on Rationalists in Contemporary India. It was aired by India's public broadcaster, Doordarshan. The film has been screened in 29 locations across the country until now.
The same year, Raksha was selected as a Chevening Fellow by the University of Westminster to research on Hindu Right in the UK. This helped Raksha build on her post graduate dissertation which was on Hindu Fundamentalists in India.
With a Fulbright Scholarship for Leadership Development, she went to the Columbia University in New York City to pursue a Masters in Science. As a student, she was offered the Scripps Howard Fellowship to report from Israel and the West Bank. Since 2011, Raksha has reported from 11 countries across the world.
Raksha worked as an editor at NDTV, leading English news channel in India. She was the editorial head of a two-hour prime time news show, where she lead a team of about 20 junior journalists.
A graduate of Lady Shri Ram College in New Delhi, Raksha was a dedicated student and a passionate public speaker.
India's First "WhatsApp Elections"
In 2019, India will organise and participate in the world’s biggest electoral exercise. About 875 million voters are eligible to cast their votes in the Indian general elections. This is more than the population of Europe.
In order for the people to choose their representative wisely, free flow of factual information is a prerequisite. However, in a world driven by the internet, as Marshall McLuhan would say, "the medium is the message”.
According to McLuhan “a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not only by the content delivered over the medium, but also by the characteristics of the medium itself.”
Social media has integrated itself into the election process in India seamlessly.
In that context these are the most important questions:
"What is the landscape of social media in India? How are political parties using social media to cement narratives and organise voters? What are different types of media? And what is different from broadcast media?
The podcast tries to address all these questions as two hosts debate issues around how impactful social media is in Indian elections.
