Based in India
Nominated by People’s Archive of Rural India
“Sanket Jain is a born storyteller. His reports pull in an audience with great opening lines and tales of people who live on the margins of society. He illuminates underreported lives.”
-Martin Adler Prize Jury
“What’s making the climate crisis severe is the rising inequality in India. Further, what’s making it much worse is the lack of media coverage. India’s 833 million people who stay in villages just get 0.6 per cent of front-page coverage in the mainstream media.
Sanket Jain is changing this by reporting on the intersection of climate change, mental health, agriculture, public health from India’s remote villages. He has a skill for finding unique stories, like how climate change is impacting the mental health of women athletes, how climate change is leading to a delay in the immunisation of children aged 0-6, how climate change is impacting the mental health of frontline women healthcare workers, and much more. Sanket was the first one to point out the link between climate change and how it is leading to a rise in cases of Seasonal Affective Disorder, also known as winter depression.
His work has been recognised at a national and international level with more than 10 journalism awards and three prestigious fellowships.”
Read some of Sanket’s work for People’s Archive of Rural India:
Biography
Sanket Jain is an independent journalist and documentary photographer based in Maharashtra’s Kolhapur district. He is a senior People’s Archive of Rural India fellow, where he is documenting vanishing livelihoods and dying art forms from rural India. He’s also an Earth Journalism Network fellow, where he reported on the impact of climate change on mental health.
His work has been featured in more than 35 national and international publications, including MIT Technology Review, Wired UK, Telegraph, The Daily Beasy, Toward Freedom, People’s Archive of Rural India, Verge, The Daily Beast, USA Today, Baffler magazine, Progressive Magazine, British Medical Journal, Equal Times, among others.
Jain, who spends over 300 days a year in India’s remote villages, has been extensively reporting on climate change and its impact on mental health, human-wildlife conflict, agrarian crisis, public healthcare, vanishing livelihoods, and other subjects through the lived experiences of everyday people.
This year, his story on how India’s women healthcare workers are using WhatsApp to save pregnant women won a One World Media Award in the women’s solutions reporting category. His stories on how climate change is affecting the mental health of women athletes, women healthcare workers, and women farmworkers also won the Covering Climate Now Award, where he was named Emerging Journalist of the Year.
Last year, his story on how climate change is impacting India’s wrestlers won the International Sports Press Association’s award. He is also the recipient of New York University’s online journalism award, the Press Institute of India Award, the Prem Bhatia Memorial Award, WAN-IFRA’s South Asian Digital Media Awards and the Ram Nath Goenka Award.
His stories also made him a finalist in the University of Michigan’s Livingston Award, Oxfam’s Journalism for an Equitable Asia Award, and Thomson Foundation’s Award.