Tisha Srivastav

She has headed Content Production (Video) for Yahoo India, been part of NDTV 24×7’s Documentary Features team as well as part, of the award-winning team for India’s first ever TV environmental features show, Living on the Edge. She has also spent six years traveling across India, four of which were with another woman in a Maruti Van in the mid-1990s. Her documentary report, Ganga with no Jal, received a nomination at the 2007 Indian Television Academy Awards. She has been the recipient of the UNDP Asia Pacific Media Fellowship in 2006-2007 for her agrarian reportage and has been awarded the National Foundation for India Fellowship in 2001-2002.

She was Co-Convenor, Healing Earth 3.0, Ashoka’s Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability’s annual flagship conference. Held in February 2023, she convened Day 2 of the conference on what is moving in climate change communication.

Media Fellowship: In partnership with the Ashoka Centre for Climate Change &

Sustainability (3CS) she has led the creation of the inaugural version of the 3CS Media Fellowship 2022-2023. For original reportage on the climate change frontlines in India.

This Media Fellowship is unique in that it privileges the point of view of Dalit, Adivasi and those from the margins. Placing them at the centre of the climate change conversation and mentoring the Fellows in partnership with The Hindu & The News Minute. Seven media persons from each of the Southern states have been chosen as the first Fellows.

Since 2019, she continues to serve on the Board of Directors of Dusty Foot Foundation, which runs the Green Hub program on video documentation and media training for wildlife conservation. Through annual courses, with disadvantaged youth from over 13 states of India.

She was a member of the All India Responsible Tourism team to submit recommendations to the Ministry of Tourism on its draft National Tourism Policy 2020.

Her engagement with the ongoing democratization movement in media also includes training field reporters of the Khabar Lahariya team in visual storytelling, during an election cycle. The Dalit and Muslim women reporters from rural Bundelkhand, in India’s leading Hindi rural news service, used WhatsApp to report and this was a six-month training in the field, in tune with KL’s digital transition from newspapers to social media, during the Assembly Elections in 2016.

Media work: As someone who started writing in print, believed in the oral power of television features, migrated to the web, trained rural field reporters on mobile WhatsApp, was a social media consultant for Fairtrade India and continues to be an observer of Indian media habit, her own writing, reportage and media experiments, span the offline and online, legacy and social media, mural and mall, photography and journalism. Her media practice is located on ideas about mainstream and margins in India.

Interviews Poet Arundhathi Subramaniam, Bhava Samvad Kalinga Literature Festival 2020

Web A meditation by the sea   Mandela, an ordinary India remembers   (Yahoo)

London, a discounted bookistan (Scroll)

A Martyr’s wife

Social media Good news no news      Whats app in the lockdown

TV 3 Independence Day specials Kick 5 pick 5

Published blogposts as a media observer

Art & media choices through a pandemic (The Wire) Share this piece. It has some good news (Newslaundry) Why I won’t be watching the FIFA world cup on TV (Sportskeeda) A new classification for books in stores (Scroll) Can there be one book for the CEO & the farmer?

Online community comments as blogpost     Insights from a public FB post                    Knowing your stars from your salesmen

LIVE: Culture of dialogue (NDTV)

Reviews: Portrait of a lady remaking history (Just Cinema) When a people’s eyes are as moist as the land: The Tharu speak(Nepal Picture Library Multimedia exhibition)

Lead, Communication campaigns

Participatory photography: Your Food your farmer (Photo exhibition by common Indians at a busy metro station)

Street mural: Live mural making experiment on busy intersection in an upper middle-class neighbourhood in Bengaluru. Examining the passersby connect with art and farmers who were painting as well.

Mall audience: Audience engagement exercises in unusual settings to forefront the farmer in urban, public view. Experiment was to unveil the then world’s largest T shirt made by Indian cotton Fairtrade farmers at a Bangalore mall, with farmers and mall audiences interacting directly. Along with the above, a podcast on urban conversations about farmers, a curated Twitter chat on Fashion and green travel, a documentary film fest, were all elements in a Fairtrade communication campaign to explore links between media and farmers. This was done as part of a Fairtrade weekend at Bengaluru, in partnership with Srishti School of Art & Design Faculty & Vidyashilp Academy, in 2015. (The latter as part of a Fairtrade Schools Pilot Programme)

Multimedia: Mango Memories (Yahoo)

TV: Republic of Hunger (NDTV)