Mumbai, India
Organized Crime and Corruption Project Fellow
Parth, 30, is an independent reporter based in Mumbai who primarily writes on rural India and sociopolitical topics. He went to work for The Los Angeles Times after training at the Missouri School of Journalism.
In 2021, Parth received a grant from the Pulitzer Center to write a series of stories on societal fallouts of COVID-19 and the inadequate health infrastructure. He was one of three finalists for the prestigious Martin Adler Prize at the Rory Peck Awards given in November in London.
Parth was a principal correspondent with IndiaSpend and worked with the Los Angeles Times for four years as its India correspondent until the newspaper closed its South Asia bureau in 2018. He has written numerous stories for People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI). He also Writes for Mumbai Mirror, Al Jazeera and the Washington Post.
For PARI, he documented the agrarian crisis in Maharashtra’s Marathwada region over a period of one year. He won the European Commission’s Lorenzo Natali Media Prize 2018 for his work on migrant sugarcane cutters. He was awarded the Ramnath Goenka prize for reporting on the farm crisis and was on the PARI team that won the Prem Bhatia Award for environmental reporting in 2020.
His editor at the LA Times called him “one of his country’s finest young journalists:” “Investigative reporting in India faces tremendous obstacles: a lack of reliable government data, hostile officials and the disturbing tendency of freedom-of-information activists to end up dead. Despite those challenges Parth has produced some strong exposés involving corruption and fraud in government programs …”
Parth interviews a woman describing her hardships in a village in Maharashtra only accessible via a makeshift raft.
Parth delivers a speech after receiving the European Commission’s Lorenzo Natali Media Prize in Brussels for his work on the migrant sugarcane cutters in 2018
Articles:
LA Times article on Covid19 repercussions, the Lost Generation
Pulitzer Center article on Covid19 repercussions
Links to stories published by Rural India and First Post
