Update 3 on the fifth day of Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s trial reaches a newsroom in Vikaspuri just as the west Delhi suburb is slipping into another summer afternoon slumber. The terse message in Burmese, mailed to assistant editor Mungpi, comes from an undercover reporter near the Insein prison in Rangoon, where Suu Kyi is being tried: “The defence counsel entered the prison at 10 a.m. Security is tight. There are plainclothes security officials, police vehicles and prison vans. Women from the National League for Democracy are here. There are many youths too, waiting in the rain.”

Mungpi, 31, an UNHCR refugee from Myanmar, is one of 20 people working at Mizzima, an independent Myanmar news agency which has been running from Delhi for a decade now. Its present home is a bare second-floor apartment, one of whose rooms is also home to Mungpi’s family. Here, the staff clean up copy, translate the news into English and upload it on to the agency’s website, where it is read by Myanmar’s people hungry for information outside of sanitised government versions—a continuous ticker on democracy’s thwarted progress in Myanmar from a newsroom in exile.

Mizzima has a 50-strong workforce, with news bureaus in Kolkata and Chiang Mai, Thailand and a liaison office in Bangkok. The agency took its first step in Delhi, nearly 1,500 miles away from Rangoon, in August 1998. “We started out in old Delhi, near Kingsway Camp, with just one laptop,” says Soe Myint, 42, editor-in-chief and one of the three founders of Mizzima—wife Thin Thin Aung and Win Aung were the other two, all veterans of Myanmar’s struggle for democracy, who had to leave the country after a military crackdown in 1988. “The Internet was just taking off at the time and it gave us ideas. I remember going into STD booths, jacking up an Internet connection and collecting and sending news, as email alerts or fax messages, to our readers and sympathisers,” says Myint. This rudimentary dissemination of news continued till 2002, when Mizzima, a Pali word for “the middle path”, moved online. Since then they have expanded at a steady clip. Today, they have a website in Burmese, another for podcasting Myanmar stories and an online photo archive. “We have around 30 reporters inside Myanmar, who work undercover, in units of two and three. They include activists, citizen journalists, ordinary people and even government officials. They send us information through email, phone, fax, and sometimes simply by crossing the border into Thailand and Bangladesh,” says Myint.

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