Srishti Jaswal

Srishti is an award-winning independent journalist based in India, after stints in New York, Paris, and Berlin. She has written on various subjects, such as politics, tech, human rights and governance for national and international publications, including the Caravan Magazine, Newslaundry, Vice World News, Al Jazeera and more. She is working on her debut non-fiction book, Post at Your Own Risk, which Pan Macmillan commissioned. In 2023, she was awarded the prestigious Ochberg fellowship at Columbia University by the Dart Centre for Journalism and Trauma. She was also awarded the Lorenzo Natali Best Emerging Journalist award by the European Commission in 2021.

She also received the International Center For Journalists (ICFJ) second Global Nutrition and Food Security Reporting prize in 2021, for the work documenting how millions of poor Indians were denied food grains during the pandemic. After that, she was also awarded a fellowship by ICFJ to advance her report on hunger in India. A story by her investigating the starvation deaths in India received a special mention in the 2021 Red-Ink awards awarded by the Mumbai Press Club. In 2021, she was awarded a grant by the prestigious National Foundation for India (NFI) to report on the agri-insurance sector. She investigated how farmers were paid seven times less compensation despite a 100 % crop loss under the Prime Minister’s insurance scheme called Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY). For this story, she was awarded the IFFCO IIMCAA award for excellence in Agriculture Reporting in 2022. In 2022, Srishti was awarded a scholarship by the Berlin Senate and Reporters without Borders, Germany, under which she spent four months in Berlin getting trained in digital security.

Before that, she was based in Paris, France in the investigative newsroom Forbidden Stories, which is known for its global investigation about the Pegasus spyware leaks along with Amnesty Lab. She investigated the far-right disinformation chambers in India for Forbidden Stories’ ‘Story Killers’ project. She is also a Pulitzer Centre grantee. Her project, The Ritual Killings, investigating the nexus between tantrics and politicians in India has received support from the Pulitzer Center and was published as the 2021 October cover story for the Caravan Magazine.

Her notable projects include a three-part series on the aftermath of Article 370 abrogation from border towns of Kashmir. She has also done extensive reportage on the modus operandi of the right-wing trolls on the internet. She also exposed how the BJP went as far as sacking its own Chief Minister to please its core voter base of Hindu nationalists who wanted to have grand celebrations of the Mahakumbh festival with the participation of millions during massive Coronavirus infections. She has also reported on the drug epidemic in Himachal Pradesh. A report by her on the third-degree torture subjected to inmates at the drug rehab centers in Himachal Pradesh led to the closure of such centers. She is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, Delhi. She has previously worked for Hindustan Times where she was awarded Editors’ Excellence award for on-the-spot reportage. She also holds an honors degree in Psychology from Panjab University.