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Award-winning indigenous journalist Dayamani Barla will visit the San Francisco Bay Area in December 2007. Dayamani Barla, a tribal woman from the Jharkhand region of India, has written about the displacement of tribal peoples from their native lands by developers. Among other things, her groundbreaking work has been instrumental in exposing the hazards of uranium mining to children in rural areas. Her work is constantly guided by her concern for the plight of the weakest and the most exploited sections of the Indian society.

Barla won the Counter Media Award for Rural Journalism in 2000 and the National Foundation for India Fellowship in 2004. Counter Media Award is funded by royalties from P Sainath's book "Everyone Loves a Good Drought", and is meant for rural journalists whose (often outstanding) work gets ignored or even appropriated by the larger press at the State or national level. Barla is one of the very few journalists from the Munda tribe and her work in a popular Hindi newspaper Prabhat Khabar brings attention to myriad problems facing the Munda people and other tribal communities in the Jharkhand region. She is also the past National President of Indian Social Action Forum. Her remarkable work is sponsored by Association for India's Development(AID) - she is an "AID Saathi", and her current trip to the US is also sponsored by AID.


A large selection of Dayamani's writings in Prabhat Khabar (with several of them translated into English) can be found here:
http://aidindia.org/main/content/category/16/93/139/


Dayamani's Bay Area visit is co-sponsored by Friends of South Asia, the SF Bay Area Chapter of AID and the National Writers Union.
The Dec 5 event at Berkeley will be co-hosted by the Berkeley Chapter of AID.