Advisory Council

Afia Salam

Afia Salam is a journalist with four decades of experience in print, electronic and web. She holds a Masters in Geography and is a LEAD, FNF’s International Academy of Leadership & Australia Awards Fellow, member of PUAN, IUCN Commission on Education & Communications and Commission on Economic & Social Policy. She is also a member of Pakistan’s national coordinating body for Marine Protected Areas. She highlights issues related to environment and climate change through her writings, does advocacy through seminars and moderates panel discussions and round tables. She is also a development practitioner, elected President of Baanhn Beli and Chair Board of Trustees Indus Earth Trust. She is currently a member of the Prime Minister’s advisory body, National Climate Change Council, Pakistan. She can be reached on Twitter @afiasalam

Ammu Joseph 

Ammu Joseph is an independent journalist and author based in Bangalore, India. Among her publications are six books: two on gender & media (Whose News? The Media and Women’s Issues and Making News: Women in Journalism), three on gender & Indian literature, and one a collection of women’s writings (Terror, Counter-Terror:  Women Speak Out). She has contributed to many other books and publications, both Indian and international (including several UNESCO initiatives). She was South Asia coordinator for the IWMF’s Global Research on Women in the News Media and has been involved with the Global Media Monitoring Project in India since 2010. She has served on the visiting faculty of several institutions of media education and is a founder-member of the Network of Women in Media, India. With degrees in English Literature (Madras University) and Public Communications (Syracuse University), she began her career with Eve’s Weekly, in Mumbai in 1977. In her last full-time job within the press, she was editor of the Sunday magazine of The Indian Post, Mumbai.

Amena H. Saiyid

Amena H. Saiyid has many years of expertise in climate and energy. Based in Washington, D.C., she is a correspondent for Cipher News, an online newsletter covering global climate and cleantech developments. In this role, she analyses the regulatory, legal and legislative impacts on the U.S. energy, chemicals and manufacturing sectors.She has covered the intersection of U.S. policy and the environment for over 20 years. She was a founding member of S&P Global’s Net-Zero Business Dailywhere she served as a Senior Climate and Energy Analyst and Journalist. She spent 13 years as a reporter for Bloomberg Environment (now energy and environment news with Bloomberg Industry Group), covering EPA appropriations, pipeline safety and hazmat transport, air pollution and more. She has also been an associate editor with S&P Platts (now S&P Global Commodity Insights), analysing coal, uranium and emissions markets. She served as a Congressional Fellow at the American Political Science Association and was an editor with Argus Media, covering climate change, air quality and emissions markets. Amena holds an MA in journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia and a BS in chemistry from the College of William & Mary.

Ayesha Kabir

Ayesha Kabir is Head of English Web at Bangladesh’s highest circulated newspaper Prothom Alo. She has had over 20 years of experience in journalism. Her main focus of interest is politics and security, particularly that of Bangladesh and South Asia. Her professional career has taken her to Nepal, Pakistan, India, Hong Kong, UK, Switzerland, the Netherlands and many other countries, reporting on current affairs, attending international conferences and networking. Having done her Bachelors and Masters degrees in English from Dhaka University, Ayesha Kabir has worked for the weekly Dhaka Courier as assistant editor, PROBE News Weekly as associate editor and has also freelanced for an extended stint. Given the present national, regional and global circumstances, Ms Kabir has also been focussing on the emergence of extremism, radicalisation, terrorism and militancy, particularly in the context of Bangladesh.

Dilrukshi Handunnetti

Dilrukshi Handunnetti is an international award-winning investigative journalist and a lawyer from Sri Lanka. She has worked extensively across South Asia, both as an on ground reporter and trainer, dedicating much of her time to working with women journalists in the region. As an investigative journalist, she has broken stories on grand corruption and crime, conflict and communities, and dedicated significant time to report on women, children, health and environment. Her work has appeared in UK Guardian, New York Times, Al Jazeera, The Humanitarian, Mongabay and many others. A recipient of many prestigious journalism fellowships, she won the covered Wash Media Award in 2014 for reporting on MDGs (Monitoring Category) by the WSSCC and SIWI for her report on school sanitation and the impact on girl children. In 2012, she won Sri Lanka’s top most journalism award, Journalist of the Year.
Dilrukshi works closely with media rights and human rights organizations especially with a gender focus. She is the co-convener of South Asian Women in Media (SAWM) – Sri Lanka Chapter and functions as the executive director of the Colombo-based Center for Investigative reporting (CIR).

Kanak Mani Dixit

Writer and journalist Kanak Mani Dixit is a vocal Southasia regionalist and visionary. He is a civil rights and democracy activist besides being a campaigner for open urban spaces in his native Nepal. He is also active in the conservation of built heritage. He helped revive Nepal’s only public bus company, introducing the concept of public transportation to the Valley. A long-time trekker, he also writes on travel related themes. Having narrowly surviving a fall while trekking in 2001, he helped start the Spinal Injury Rehabilitation Centre. Believing the power of non-fiction film, he started and heads the Film South Asia Festival of Documentaries. Kanak translates and authors political commentaries, and is also a popular author of children’s books. He received the Prince Claus Award of the Netherlands in 2009. He heads the main archives of the Nepali language, the Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya and his own writings are archived at www.kanakmanidixit.com

Kathy Gannon

Kathy Gannon covered Afghanistan and Pakistan for 35 years, including as chief correspondent and later news director of The Associated Press, based in Islamabad. She has also covered the 2006 war in south Lebanon, the Iraq war, the Central Asian States, and Azerbaijan. A Canadian citizen living in Pakistan, Gannon was the only Western journalist allowed in Kabul by the Taliban in the weeks preceding the 2001 US-British offensive in Afghanistan. She was the 2022 fall semester Joan Shorenstein Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Namrata Sharma

Patricia Mukhim

Patricia Mukhim is an award-winning journalist and calls herself a journalist-activist . She is the recipient of numerous awards including the Padma Shri in the year 2000. She has also received the Chameli Devi Jain award, ONE India award, FICCI-FLO award, UpendraNath Brahma Soldier of Humanity award, Siva Prasad Barooah National award and North East Excellence award. She is the founder member of Shillong, We Care a non-governmental organization involved in the fight against militancy in Meghalaya. Patricia served as member of the National Security Advisory Board of the Government of India between 2010-14. She also served as a member of the National Foundation for Communal Harmony, under the Ministry of Home Affairs, India. She writes on several contentious issues for the national and regional media.

Raza Ahmad Rumi

Raza Ahmad Rumi is former director, Park Center for Independent Media, Ithaca College and visiting faculty at Cornell Institute for Public Affairs. He is editor, The Friday Times and founder of NayaDaur Media. He is a member of the think tank Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, Georgetown University; and a nonresident fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs. He was a fellow at the New America Foundation, United States Institute of Peace and the National Endowment for Democracy. He has authored several books including Delhi by Heart: Impressions of a Pakistani Traveller, The Fractious Path: Pakistan’s Democratic Transition, Identity, Faith and Conflict and Being Pakistani: Society Culture and the Arts. He co-edited a volume of essays entitled Rethinking Pakistan, Anthem Press, September 2020.

Richard McGill Murphy

Richard McGill Murphy is a journalist and publisher who has produced award-winning coverage of business, technology and international affairs. He has deep experience working in South Asia as a foreign correspondent, documentarian and ethnographer. Murphy studied literature at Harvard College and started his journalism career in Afghanistan. He earned a doctorate in social anthropology from Oxford University based on fieldwork in Lahore, Pakistan, where he was a Fulbright Scholar.

Sanjoy Hazarika

Sanjoy Hazarika is an author, journalist, filmmaker, policy analyst and human rights advocate. He has written extensively in Indian and international newspapers and journals in a career spanning over 40 years when he reported for The New York Times for over 16 years. His interests include developments in Myanmar, Bhutan, Tibet, Bangladesh and Nepal. He founded the Centre for North East Studies and Policy Research in 2000 which has an innovative flagship programme – a fleet of boat clinics on the Brahmaputra valley. Supported by the National Health Mission, since 2005, it reaches nearly 300,000 people every year with healthcare. Between 2016-2022 he was international director of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) which has worked extensively on police, prison reforms and Right to Information. Regarded as an authority on the region and its neighborhood, Hazarika was the founder of the first Centre for the study of the North-eastern region (NER) in a Central University, Jamia Millia Islamia.  Hazarika has authored five books including ‘Bhopal, the Lessons of a Tragedy’ (Penguin), the acclaimed ‘Strangers of the Mist’ (Penguin) on conflicts in the North East and its neighbourhood and its successor, 25 years later, ‘Strangers No More’ (Aleph). He has just completed a travelogue on his journeys on the Brahmaputra – from Tibet to the Bay of Bengal. He has also co-edited several books including ‘Hope Behind Bars’ (Pan MacMillan) and ‘Japan and India’s North East: Engagement through Connectivity’ (Routledge). of India. His essays have appeared in peer reviewed journals, collections and anthologies including the Routledge Companion to the North East.Hazarika has scripted and produced over a dozen documentaries including on the Brahmaputra River, river dolphins and on governance and conflict. 

Dr. Shahidul Alam 

Shahidul Alam obtained a PhD in chemistry before switching to photography. He subsequently founded the Drik Photo Agency, the Pathshala Media Institute and the Chobi Mela festival of photography, and introduced email to Bangladesh. In 2018, the Bangladesh authorities detained and tortured him for criticising the government. He spent over three months in jail, and was released on bail following a massive global campaign. Time Magazine named him Person of the Year 2018. His work has been exhibited in many prestigious galleries worldwide. His 2011 memoir ‘My journey as a witness’, is described by late legendary photo editor John Morris as the “most important book ever written by a photographer”.

Tarun Basu

Tarun Basu is a media veteran of over 45 years, having worked with leading national and international media houses. He was the founder-editor in chief and director of IANS (India Abroad News Service that later became Indo Asian News Service) that blazed a new trail in news agency journalism in India, and made it known as a trusted Southasian media brand for reliable, nonpartisan and objective news and analysis. Known for his wide contacts in governmental, non-governmental, institutional and diplomatic circles, he has travelled with eight Indian prime ministers and three presidents to all continents as part of their invited media delegations. Since retiring from media, he has headed the Society for Policy Studies, a policy think tank which runs South Asia Monitor, a highly regarded window and a valuable resource on the larger South Asian and Indo-Pacific region.  Pre-pandemic SPS also ran under Basu’s editorship a fortnightly journal called India Review & Analysis that was much sought after by foreign embassies. He has lectured on media and its relationship with the government at several media institutes and universities, including the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC), New Delhi, Christ University, Ghaziabad, Amity University, Noida. He has also lectured at the South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg, Germany, which published his research paper on “Media and the Indian Prime Minister” tracing the different relationships and outlook of various prime ministers with the media, from Jawaharlal Nehru to Narendra Modi.He has maintained a keen interest in the accomplishments of Indians abroad – a community now considered to be 35 million strong and a source of soft power for the country – and has through his various travels kept in close touch with the community. He has particularly tracked the phenomenal growth path of the Indian American community through his previous associations with the iconic India Abroad newspaper and has written a widely acclaimed book “Kamala Harris and the Rise of Indian Americans”. He takes a keen interest in social upliftment issues and is on the Board of Directors of Venu Eye Institute and Research Centre, New Delhi.  He is also the Managing Partner of a media consultancy company, Crossmedia Advisory Services Pvt Ltd.