Biography

Dola Mitra studied journalism in school in the US and completed her Masters degree in India. She has worked for the past two decades as reporter with different Indian publications. She was the eastern region correspondent and a senior associate editor for the national newsmagazine Outlook and earlier she was principal correspondent for the newspaper, The Telegraph. She has covered politics, culture and environment and reported from conflict zones. Her work entailed travelling to India's neighboring countries of Bangladesh, Bhutan, Myanmar and Nepal as well as other parts of the world.  Her two books on Bengal and Bengal politics have received critical acclaim and she has received the UNFPA supported Population First's Laadli Award for gender-sensitive reporting from the strife-torn jungles of West Bengal. Her environmental reportage includes the stories she did from the Sunderbans, the world's largest delta and her coverage of cyclones in the Bay of Bengal.  She has not only written hundreds of articles for the news publications she worked for but also for other media including covering the cyclones Fani and Amphan for the US weather portal, The Weather Channel. In 2019 she started the digital news portal Cuckoo News which is a general interest website and covers environment as a topic of priority. In 2021 she received a grant from the Earth Journalism Network to track a story on health in the Bay of Bengal region. She is particularly proud of the five-part video story, "People of the Delta" which emerged. It highlighted the plight of the people of the Sundarbans delta during times of health emergencies. In 2022 Dola received another grant from EJN to track a story on, “Renewable Energy in India: Prospects and Potential Challenges of the Sector Beyond Solar”. Her focus was Sunderbans’ potential for tidal RE. She lives in Kolkata.