SHARADA BALASUBRAMANIAN
Environmental and development journalist
Sharada Balasubramanian is an international award-winning environmental and development journalist. She has published solution-oriented environmental stories on water, agriculture, climate change, wildlife and conservation, energy. Her work has appeared in Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Climate News Network, Deutsche Welle, Dhaka Tribune, Rural 21, and other publications. She has spent over 15 years in the media industry.
She does audio, video and photojournalism, along with text stories.
Sharada won the prestigious Prem Bhatia Memorial Trust Award for excellence in Environmental Reporting in 2019. She won two Asian Environmental Journalism Awards in 2019 - Environmental journalist of the year, and Environmental story of the year. She won the Statesman award- The Cushrow Irani prize for environmental reporting in 2014.
In 2022, she received the Earth Journalism Network grant to cover the International Whaling Commission meeting in Slovenia. In the same year, she received the Renewable Energy grant and the Oxpeckers grant for investigation in wildlife crime.
Sharada was a fellow of Asia Europe Foundation (ASEF) 2017 in Myanmar, where she presented a paper –From reactive to proactive reporting on climate change.
She was selected for the Young Scholars and Professionals workshop at International Union of Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) Water Futures II –Ecosystems for Life, an India-Bangladesh initiative in 2014.
She was one of the journalists from Asia selected for the UN World Water Day journalism workshop in Tokyo, March 2014. One of her photographs was long-listed by the UN on Water for Life Decade photo exhibition.
She was a Deutsche Welle Climate Change Reporting Fellow South Asia 2013. She was selected for the science journalism fellowship from the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) in 2013.
As an independent journalist, she has covered stories from Ladakh to Nagapattinam, to Andaman Islands. She has covered stories from India, Bangladesh, Slovenia and Egypt, internationally.
Sharada worked with international media including NHK Japan, PBS News Hour, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) as interviewer, researcher and interpreter.
She is also a writer, and has published travel stories, short stories. Her full length book Silappadhikkaram was out on Audible in 2021.
Currently, she is writing books, and mentoring budding and practicing journalists on environmental journalism.
