Bahar Dutt (born 20 June 1975) is an Indian television journalist and environmental editor and columnist for

CNN-IBN CNN-News18 (originally CNN-IBN) is an Indian English-language news television channel founded by Raghav Bahl based in Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India. It is currently co-owned by Network18 Group and Warner Bros. Discovery. CNN provides internat ...

Early life

Bahar Dutt is the daughter of SP Dutt and Prabha Dutt, who was among India's first female journalists and influenced Bahar's career path. Bahar Dutt is the sister of well-known journalist

Barkha Dutt Barkha Dutt is an Indian television journalist and author. She has been a reporter and news anchor at NDTV and Tiranga TV. She currently runs her own digital news channel called 'MoJo Story'. She is also an opinion columnist with '' The Hind ...

. Bahar is the only Indian environmental journalist to have won Green Oscar for her reporting on environment issues in India. Dutt is a

wildlife Wildlife refers to undomesticated animal species, but has come to include all organisms that grow or live wild in an area without being introduced by humans. Wildlife was also synonymous to game: those birds and mammals that were hunted ...

conservationist by training. She first earned a degree in social work from

University of Delhi Delhi University (DU), formally the University of Delhi, is a collegiate central university located in New Delhi, India. It was founded in 1922 by an Act of the Central Legislative Assembly and is recognized as an Institute of Eminence (IoE ...

. Dutt then pursued wildlife conservation at the

Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology The Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology (DICE) is a subdivision and research centre of the School of Anthropology and Conservation at the University of Kent, started in 1989 and named in honour of the famous British naturalist Gerald Du ...

from the

University of Kent , motto_lang = , mottoeng = Literal translation: 'Whom to serve is to reign'(Book of Common Prayer translation: 'whose service is perfect freedom')Graham Martin, ''From Vision to Reality: the Making of the University of Kent at Canterbury'' ...

and earned her MSc degree.

Career

Before turning to journalism, Dutt worked on her own conservation projects. She spent seven years with the Bahelias, or snake charmers, across

Haryana Haryana (; ) is an Indian state located in the northern part of the country. It was carved out of the former state of East Punjab on 1 Nov 1966 on a linguistic basis. It is ranked 21st in terms of area, with less than 1.4% () of India's land ...

and

Rajasthan Rajasthan (; lit. 'Land of Kings') is a state in northern India. It covers or 10.4 per cent of India's total geographical area. It is the largest Indian state by area and the seventh largest by population. It is on India's northwestern ...

in northern India. India's Wildlife Protection Act of 1972 made wild animals public property, which made the snake charmers' practice of catching snakes and training them illegal. Dutt worked with them to combine their knowledge of snakes and musical abilities into public performances and education without the use of snakes. In that project she merged wildlife conservation and heritage preservation. Her work with the snake charmers was featured in media. She was hired in 2005 to be an environmental journalist by

Rajdeep Sardesai Rajdeep Sardesai (born 24 May 1965) is an Indian news anchor, reporter, journalist and author. He is a consulting editor and an anchor of India Today Television. He was the Editor-in-Chief of Global Broadcast News, that included CNN-IBN, IBN7 ...

. For CNN-IBN she is the Environment Editor, she has done undercover investigations, news reports. Her reportage has influenced policy and led to the stoppage of many illegal projects coming up on wetlands and forests

Notable works of journalism

In 2006, she directed ''Last Dance of the Sarus''. This was an award-winning investigative news piece about the drainage of wetlands in eastern India that are the habitat of almost a third of the world's sarus cranes. The drainage project was for the proposed development of an airport. Bahar recently released her book, ''Green Wars''. The book draws on Dutt's experience as a conservationist to look at how the tension between a modernising economy and saving the planet can be resolved.

Awards

* 2006 Ramnath Goenka Award for excellence in environmental reporting for ''Last Dance of the Sarus'' * 2006 Wildscreen Award (International). Dutt was awarded a "Red Panda" in 2006 for ''Last Dance of the Sarus'' in the news category by the

Wildscreen Festival Wildscreen is a wildlife conservation charity based in Bristol, England. The charity was founded in December 1987 from a trust which had operated since 1982, with the initial aim of encouraging and applauding excellence in the production of nat ...

. * 2007 Young Environment Journalist Award * 2009 Sanctuary-RBS Wildlife Awards. Dutt was awarded the Wings award for raising the stature of environmental journalism. * 2009 Sanskriti award

References

External links

* IBN Live channel,
CJ Show: Bahar Dutt takes viewers questions
(9 June 2013)

columns by Bahar Dutt * https://web.archive.org/web/20120903192815/http://www.wildscreen.org.uk/downloads/India2009.pdf

First ever news journalist to win Green Oscar

{{DEFAULTSORT:Dutt, Bahar Living people Alumni of the University of Kent Environmental journalists Indian women television journalists Indian television journalists Journalists from Delhi Delhi University alumni 1975 births Women writers from Delhi 21st-century Indian women writers 21st-century Indian writers 21st-century Indian journalists