ruhani kaur

In these trying pandemic-hit times, I explore the intertwined destinies of daughters struggling to complete their education as child brides and mothers fighting for financial independence as working women with low literacy. Ten million girls now face the risk of dropping out of secondary school, with the specter of almost as many child brides in future being frighteningly real. Many of these girls have dreams that they want to pursue, even as they are being married off in their teens. This is...

Jamyang Choetso has spent much of the past two years run off her feet, working as a nurse in the pandemic-stricken Indian capital of New Delhi. So it was only natural that she would take some time off - to participate in an international sporting event. Writes James Griffiths for The Globe and Mail. Photo: Ruhani Kaur/The Globe and Mail

A small fraction of women in India had formal employment before the pandemic. Covid made it so much worse.

India's severe heat wave in May 2022 and how the urban poor, not contrubutors to climate change, are bearing the brunt of it.

Photojournalist Ruhani Kaur traces the story of three child brides from the northern Indian state of Haryana who dream of studying and working against all odds.
Priyanka, Meenakshi and Shiwani grew up in Damdama, an urban village that is home to Gujjars, an influential agricultural community. Their village is less than half an hour from Gurgaon, an upscale suburb of India's capital, Delhi.
The girls, around 16 years old, have bee...

"I knew I had to stand up," Radha Devi, a covid widow says. "I had to change myself for the kids, or they too would get left behind."
"So many people died in front of me," she says, describing the long line of people coming into the emergency ward and the bodies being carted out. "It looked like people were going into the hospital to die. They were going but not coming back."

Taslima, Refugee fromMyanmar and her daughter Mizan look back at how life was in Myanmar and how its has changed since they left. A video made for UNHCR.- Ruhani Kaur

NEW DELHI — Inside a former army barracks, Simran Sagar sings a Hindi love song as she makes tea for her fiancé on what they hoped would be their wedding day. But their marriage keeps getting delayed.
Her voice echoes off the cold cement walls. "Like a shooting star that falls from the sky, our lives fell apart, darling," the lyrics go.
This is not how they imagined their first home together: a mattress on the floor, a hot plate to cook on and a police guard stationed out front. It's a secret...

By Roli Srivastava, Anuradha Nagaraj, Thomson Reuters Foundation

It's been over a month since his mother died, but Vishal Meghwal can still hear her struggling to breathe as he desperately messaged friends to lend him money for the drugs she needed. The coronavirus pandemic had already cost the 24-year-old his savings and his income from painting houses in Ajmer, a city of tombs and shrines in northwest India. Losing his mother was the biggest blow of all.

Fears about safety are driving many women out of the workforce. Photographed for Bloomberg’s story on Sexual Violence is Holding back the Rise of India’s Economy, which part of ‘India’s Oppressed Women find a Voice’ won the SOPA 2019 Award for Excellence in Reporting on Women’s Issues.

Charged with sedition, the pregnant Muslim woman remains in jail

Text by Gunjeet Sra and Images by Ruhani Kaur

We met Safoora Zargar, a 27-year-old M.Phil. student of Jamia Milia Islamia university in New Delhi, for the first time early this year when she was in the middle of a meeting, prepping for a peace march that Jamia was organising. In the middle of winter, swaddled in a coat, a scarf and big round glasses, she could easily pass off as any other student but her powerful voice and quiet...

On Monday, We Co. said it would file a request with the Securities and Exchange Commission to withdraw its IPO proposal. The company said it is postponing the offering to focus on its core business and that it has “every intention to operate WeWork as a public company” but didn’t provide a time frame.
To cut costs, the company’s new co-CEOs, Sebastian Gunningham and Artie Minson, are planning thousands of job cuts, putting extraneous businesses up for sale and purging some luxuries from the p...

As India emerges from the deadly second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, amidst speculations about a third wave coming, UN Women spotlights women on the front lines of the pandemic response in the capital, Delhi, on World Humanitarian Day (19 August).
With less than one doctor for every thousand people, and a medical system stretched to its seams, women have shouldered an enormous burden of care since the pandemic started in India. Women make up 47 per cent of all health workers and more than 8...

Living next to three chimneys of the Anpara Thermal Power Plant, 50-year-old Rajkumar Devi connects the dots that led her to her ills: “I got blood cancer right from the time the plant started coming up. I spend `9,000 for 30 tablets from PGI every month.”

Living with Coal, a 4 minute film for which I collaborated with Vivek Singh was part of Purpose International’s entry for the ‘Help Delhi Breathe’ campaign which was a finalist in the Environment and Sustainability category in the 3rd Annual Shorty Social Good Awards of 2018. It documents the journey of coal from the power plant to the human body, leaving a path ridden with disease in its wake at Singrauli, Madhya Pradesh.