Menaka Rao
GRANTEE
Menaka Rao is an award-winning journalist with more than 19 years of experience. She's an editor at Suno India, a podcasting platform.
Rao has reported extensively on health, nutrition, and justice through the lens of gender rights, children's rights, and the right to food. She has reported on public health issues including access to health, reproductive rights, and children’s health, as well as extensively covering infectious diseases that affect a large number of Indians, such as tuberculosis.
Rao has worked for several newspapers, including The Indian Express, Hindustan Times, and news portal Scroll.in. She has also written for BBC, The Guardian, and Fifty Two, among others.
She won the Mumbai Press Club's Red Ink Award for the best story in the Health and Wellness category in 2018, and Laadli Awards for Gender Sensitivity in 2015 and 2022. In 2023, she was awarded the Médecins Sans Frontières' Without Borders Media Fellowship for reporting on a neglected tropical disease, kala-azar.
