Swaran Singh Danewalia
Bathinda
On the evening of September 8...
Swaran Singh Danewalia held a lonely vigil on a cotton farm overlooking the railway track near village Katar Singh Wala in Bathinda district. It paid off.
The following day, Danewalia, India TV’s stringer at Bathinda, had a story that exposed theft from trains that ferried oil. Danewalia’s visuals showed a group of people, including women and children, filling buckets of oil from the train. Within hours of the channel running the story, a probe was ordered and Danewalia is happy with the response his expose got.
Danewalia, now 42, has been in journalism for years. What started as a hobby in school days, when he joined a photography club in his school, turned into a profession. ‘‘I have no formal education in videography. It was my interest that drove me to this field,’’ says the Political Science postgraduate.
Danewalia says he does about five stories a week on average for India TV—he is paid Rs 1,000 for every story, besides travelling expenses.
Though he thinks fondly of all his stories, his personal favourite is a story he did a couple of years ago exposing a rice scam in FCI.
He may be happy working with the channel he’s now with, but he looks back at his 10-year-old career with one regret. ‘‘I’m still what I was ten years ago—a stringer.’’
–Navjeevan Gopal

Vinod
Mahajan
Meerut
January 2004, Meerut
When Vinod Mahajan started working at a petrol pump in Meerut more than 20 years ago, he never imagined that life would take a complete U-turn one day. Today, at 48, he is known more as a journalist than as a small-time gas station attendant who later dabbled in several failed ventures.
In 2004, his news story on Gudiya, the wife of a prisoner of war who married another man after her husband didn’t return from the war front, hit national headlines. The big break came four years after he joined a television channel as stringer for Rs 1,000 per story. ‘‘A two column story had appeared in a Hindi daily about an Indian soldier about to be released by Pakistan. I set out to explore and it turned out to be much bigger than I had imagined,’’ he remembers.
His quest led him to another big break a year later when his story on Imrana, a Muslim woman who accused her own father-in-law of rape, put him in national spotlight again. This time, he travelled to Muzaffarnagar for the story.
And though there has been much criticism of the visual media’s treatment of the stories, Mahajan argues that he simply did his job. ‘‘When we started, we didn’t anticipate that the stories would turn out to be so important. We didn’t intend to harm anyone. But if the media is accused of going overboard, I would say that our highlighting the issue only helped matters get better,’’ he says.
But much before his city stories stirred debates in the national media, Mahajan started out with passing news to a reporter with a local daily. The fact that his cable control room was close to a local hospital buzzing with news helped immensely. ‘‘My news sense developed and I began learning the ropes,’’ he says.
Later, he hit the streets of Meerut with a hired video camera generally used for shooting marriage ceremonies. ‘‘I just wanted to record news and was fascinated by the exercise,’’ he says.
That was 13 years ago. The amateur videos shot then were put to good use. He started broadcasting the clips compiled into a programme called City Hulchul on his cable network that he set up in 1989 after his dealings in sports equipment and shares didn’t yield much. ‘‘At that time, I had stopped feeling ashamed of my failures and poverty; I was not afraid of taking risks anymore,’’ he says.
The effort paid off. His brush with self-willed city journalism led him to apply for the vacancy of a stringer with a private television channel. And, once he started, there was no looking back. Today, his old scooter has given way to a white Santro, and days of walking in the scorching sun with cable wires are just painful flashes from the past, dimmed by the whirring of the air conditioner in his adequately equipped office.
But alongside journalism, he still runs his cable business to support the expenses on reporting that often exceed the amount he is paid for the exercise. He insists he is a journalist out of passion and not compulsion. ‘‘I use my own car and camera and am never paid for any damages to the equipment since I am a stringer and not a full-time staffer with any news channel,’’ he explains.
In the coming months, Mahajan plans to float a film company that would produce music videos and comedy films. But the enterprising journalist still has a regret: He is still a stringer, though with a different channel.
–Pallavi Singh

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