BANDA, India: An all-women team of smartphone-toting, low-caste reporters who chronicle India’s hardscrabble heartland may give the cinema-mad country its first Oscar-winning film, after their own story became a critically lauded documentary.
The journalists of “Khabar Lahariya” (Waves of News) have built a huge following across Uttar Pradesh, a northern state with more people than Brazil, covering a beat that runs from cow thefts to sexual violence and corruption.
They have earned the respect of their village communities by covering local stories often overlooked by India’s established media outlets, but only after a relentless battle to be taken seriously by authorities — and even their…
