Oscar spotlight shines on India's rural women journalist

Geeta Devi (right), senior journalist of 'Khabar Lahariya' interviews a woman who she says was abandoned by her husband, while reporting in Banda district, Uttar Pradesh. Photos: AFP

AN all-women team of smartphone-toting, low-caste reporters who chronicle India's hardscrabble heartland may give the cinema-mad country its first Oscar-winning film, after their own story became a critically lauded documentary.

The journalists of Khabar Lahariya (Waves of News) have built a huge following across Uttar Pradesh, a northern state with more people than Brazil, covering a beat that runs from cow thefts to sexual violence and corruption.