Dayamani Barla

Dayamani was born in a tribal family (also known as Adivasi in India) in the Jharkhand state of eastern India. Her family belonged to the Munda tribe. Dayamani's father, like other tribals in the region, was cheated out of his property because he could not read and lacked paperwork to show his rights to the land. Her father became a servant in one city, and her mother a maid in another. Barla remained in school in Jharkhand but worked as a day laborer on farms from the 5th to 7th grades. To continue her education through secondary school, she moved to Ranchi and worked as a maid to pay her way through university. She sometimes slept at railway stations in order to continue her education in journalism. ==Career==

Barla works in a popular Hindi newspaper to bring attention to myriad problems facing the Munda people and other tribal communities in the Jharkhand region. She is the National President of Indian Social Action Forum INSAF. Her early journalistic work was supported by a small fellowship through the Association for India's Development (AID). Barla owns and runs a tea shop that effectively supports her journalistic work and career. She chose the business consciously because tea shops are gathering places where social issues are discussed. ==Activism==

The Jharkhand region is rich in natural resources and many government and private companies have appropriated land to build a number of natural resource extracting factories. Although the tribal people are supposed to receive compensation, a number of activists allege that they do not receive adequate compensation. ==Awards==

• Barla won the Counter Media Award for Rural Journalism in 2000 and the National Foundation for India Fellowship in 2004. Counter Media Award is funded by royalties from journalist P. Sainath's book Everyone Loves a Good Drought, and is meant for rural journalists whose (often outstanding) work gets ignored or even appropriated by the larger press at the state or national level in India. == See also ==