The Aravallis Are Calling

When Neelam Ahluwalia was working as an environmental investigative journalist with Doordarshan's programme, Living on the Edge, in May 1997, a story and a man's words changed her entire life's trajectory.

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When Neelam Ahluwalia was working as an environmental investigative journalist with Doordarshan's programme, Living on the Edge, in May 1997, a story and a man's words changed her entire life's trajectory.

Ahluwalia, now a 52-year-old Gurugram-based documentary filmmaker and communications consultant, had travelled to a remote coastal village in Odisha to report on illegal shrimp farming, and how industrialists that exported shrimp dumped untreated effluents in the nearby water, causing the fish to die and the farmers' fields to become barren.

She recalls, "One night, I was speaking to some villagers when the industrialists' henchmen came with lathis to get us to hand over the tapes and camera to them so no one ever sees the report. The villagers formed a human chain around us, and the village headman told us to leave and that they will take care of it."

While I was leaving, he held my hand in his and said, 'I hope the story that you do makes a difference to our lives.'

When Ahluwalia came back, she couldn't get the village headman's voice out of her head, and decided to work with rural communities to help them preserve their 'jal-jungle-zameen'.