K. A. Shaji (journalist)

K A Shaji is a South India-based journalist who reports regularly on political developments, environmental issues, health, livelihood, dalit issues, tribal affairs, art, culture and developmental disparities. Travelling extensively in the most backward regions of Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, he also writes on poverty, impoverishment and other different forms of rural distress.
He is a regular contributor to HuffPost India, Mongabay India, Down to Earth, , The News Minute, Kochi Post and Quartz. Shaji is now working in areas of social advocacy as well as grassroots-level development. Till December 2018, he was a Special Correspondent with the daily newspaper The Hindu, focusing on environment, dalits, tribal affairs, art, culture and socio-political issues.
Early life
Shaji, who hails from Cheeral village in Wayanad district of Kerala, has a postgraduate degree in Personnel Management and Industrial Relations, besides a postgraduate diploma in Journalism and Mass Communication. He completed his school education from Government Upper Primary School at Kallinkara and Government Model High School at Cheeral. A graduate in sociology from Zamorin's Guruvayurappan College College, Kozhikode, he took his Master's degree from Alagappa University in Karaikudi.
Career as journalist
He started his career in journalism as a staff reporter with The New Indian Express in 2000. He continued with the organisation till 2006, and worked as its correspondent in Kalpetta, Kannur, Kozhikode and Bangalore. After working with Tehelka Magazine in New delhi and Thiruvananthapuram for over three years, Shaji joined Open a features and current affairs magazine, based in New Delhi, as its Tamil Nadu correspondent based in Chennai. Later, he joined The Times of India as its bureau chief in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu.
He is at present based out of Thiruvananthapuram.
His areas of focus include rural distress, farmer suicides, human rights violations, caste atrocities, and flawed developmental perspectives.
Recognition
He won a National Media Fellowship from the National Foundation for India in 2005 for Excellence in Journalism. Under the fellowship, he wrote a series of articles on half a million Tamil repatriates from Sri Lanka, who currently have a harrowing existence in Nilgiris district of Tamil Nadu. In 2009, he won the Sanskriti National Journalism Award for a series of articles he wrote on the agrarian crisis that plagued Wayanad district of Kerala. In an article written on the tenth-anniversary special issue of Outlook, eminent journalist and Ramon Magsaysay Award winner Palagummi Sainath listed KA Shaji as one among the promising young journalists.
As a translator
He has translated Palagummi Sainath's acclaimed work Everybody Loves a Good Drought to Malayalam. He has also translated the late civil service officer P S Krishnan's biographical work, A Crusade for Social Justice: Bending Governance to the Deprived. He translated into Malayalam The Glass Menagerie of Tennessee Williams, Selected Plays of Rabindranath Tagore and Harvest of Hate, authored jointly by Swamy Agnivesh and Valson Thampu
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