Khatau Jani

As a volunteer correspondent for a provincial newspaper, Khatau Jani has established a drought-monitoring and relief system that joins responsible, on-the-ground reporting with efforts to push ahead with citizen action that will in turn result in increased attention to drought-stricken areas. Having already brought some relief to over two million desert people, Khatau is extending his methods to journalists and citizen sector organizations.

Khatau grew up in the Thar region of Pakistan, near the border with India. He knows the crisis of thirst and famine that drought can bring to the millions of people and animals who live in this and other arid areas in the region. Through a combination of on-the-ground reporting and citizen involvement, Khatau brings relief to drought-stricken areas of the country and uses existing media channels to influence important policies. Policymakers have come to rely on Khatau's own news stories and reports to show the way to judicious allocation of resources, but Khatau sees that one person working alone cannot solve a problem of this size. Thus, he is stringing together a network of supporters–citizens, journalist peers, and government officials–in a national effort that joins fact-finding, investigative reporting, citizen lobbying, and news campaigns to affect public policy and bring relief to drought-stricken areas. He is setting up press clubs in villages and cities and has established a committee to coordinate government and citizen efforts to curtail drought and provide relief when drought strikes. His efforts have led to such changes as allowing the movement of wheat in disaster areas during the standard ban period, as well as the revival of drought-monitoring operations. Currently, Khatau is using his network to advocate district-level oversight of drought "declaration," a policy change that would speed up the response time to disaster by eliminating the need to first declare, formally and at a national level, the onset of a drought. He is establishing press clubs and preparing local volunteers to take advantage of constructive changes in the news industry that will allow him to spread his work to other areas.

Tharparkar, like other fringe regions of Pakistan, is a primarily desert environment supporting a pastoral, subsistence economy. As such, the nearly one million inhabitants of this arid area are critically dependent on the annual monsoons. These rains recharge the ground water and surface water reserves necessary for consumption and domestic use, irrigate the food and cash crops required for human sustenance, and support the regrowth of seasonal and perennial grasses essential for livestock. For no group are the rains more vital than for the lower caste Hindus, who comprise about one-fifth of the region's population. Having been forced for centuries to live a nomadic lifestyle without being permitted to accumulate property or build permanent homes, their livelihood depends on providing labor for others.
Under these conditions, droughts ravage the land and people, causing large-scale destruction, starvation, and mass migration. Continuous absence of rain for three to four years completely eliminates all plant and animal stocks, high velocity winds blow off the topsoil, leaving hungry animals, and people cut all remaining plants and trees, resulting in desertification. As life and livelihoods in these areas become unsustainable or untenable during drought disasters, large numbers of families migrate or starve to death, while those that remain fall deeper into indebtedness and poverty. In this regard, Tharparkar is not alone. Almost one-third of Balochistan province, the upper reaches of the Cholistan desert in Sindh and Punjab, the southern part of the NW Frontier Province, and vast tracts of Baltistan and Gilgit face similar conditions.
Despite the devastating consequences of drought, policymakers, their advisers, and the general public have very little understanding of it and its impact; disaster monitoring in the public and citizen sectors is weak, when it exists at all. The absence of communication facilities and relevant expertise contribute significantly to the lack of awareness and resources allocated to the problem. Being on the border with India, Tharparkar is treated as militarily sensitive and is subject to a policy of deliberate underdevelopment. With few communication links in these remote areas, journalists with limited resources and little training have difficulty investigating the causes and issues surrounding disasters. Moreover, correspondents have little incentive to do so; since journalists in such areas are volunteers and make their living by selling the newspapers for which they work, they see their main duty as reporting statements of local politicians about national events, accidents, or social situations they feel will make news and increase sales. As a result of minimal information and oversight, the relief reaching disaster victims is inadequate in quantity and of poor quality, with government-sponsored operations plagued by bureaucratic delays, corruption, and politically motivated manipulation.

Khatau focuses his efforts along two fronts: establishing a comprehensive drought-monitoring and communications system to identify disaster conditions and bring attention to affected areas, and campaigning for public policies to more effectively and efficiently respond to, and provide relief for, victims of drought.
Drawing on his skills as a journalist, Khatau has set up the first drought-monitoring program in his region. His methods are unique: he travels all over Tharparkar, regularly going to weekly fairs, visiting hospitals in different cities, and sitting at bus stops in Mithi to collect information and news about drought conditions. Khatau aims to create as comprehensive a picture of the causes, conditions, and consequences of the drought as he can. To this end, he seeks information not only about the present but also about the past, by talking to elders and studying the region's history from gazettes and record books. He is also constantly in touch with the national association of journalists and has participated in forming the Sindh union of journalists to keep track of emerging viewpoints and directions related to drought.
With the information gathered, Khatau then distributes it. Every 10 to 15 days, he writes an investigative report that partly summarizes the big picture and adds the new information to update it, which is published in Kawish–a Sindhi language daily newspaper. When a crisis happens, he makes headlines. He continually feeds the print and electronic media about the drought situation and reaches out to BBC and other local correspondents of global news agencies to apprise them of the latest situation.
Although Khatau's distinctive methods for drought monitoring have made him a resource person on the subject–a position he uses to take the issue national–he does not simply report the news. Rather, he draws on his investigations to conduct information-based campaigns to shape public policy. He established his credibility in 1990 when the government, in response to his reporting, declared a drought and subsequently announced a relief operation that included road construction to improve communication and transportation in Tharparkar. Since then, his monitoring reports have found quick response from the government, and have shaped substantial changes in policy. For example, his investigations about poor and inadequate relief efforts led to a government enquiry, resulting in the issuance of additional aid; the government also lifted a ban on the movement of wheat in drought hit areas to allow the sale of wheat grown in another district in Tharparkar. By reporting on droughts in other regions of Pakistan, Khatau also aims to affect policymaking on the provincial and national levels. His goal is to bring the decision to declare an area hit with drought within the purview of local government, a power that currently resides with the provincial authorities. Khatau believes this will make disaster monitoring more efficient and directly involve the government machinery in the process.
With citizen organizations like Thardeep (a local citizen organization), the Journalistic Resource Centre, and a South Asian disaster-monitoring agency already taking up drought monitoring, Khatau realizes that systematizing his efforts is critical to sustaining and broadening its reach within his home region and beyond. To this end, he has begun setting up press clubs in small towns and educating rural activists to gather and communicate information related to disasters. He feels that the scale of such an operation requires committed volunteer effort, and he is trying to motivate others by his own example. At the same time, Khatau believes that changes taking place in the news industry will bring professionalism and divert much needed resources toward investigative journalism. By establishing press clubs and organizing seminars and workshops, he is preparing the local correspondents to make use of these changes for disaster communication.
As Khatau's lobbying increases the local government's responsibility for drought monitoring, these press clubs will serve two purposes. First, they will ensure the transparency and public accountability of government actions in relation to drought. Second, they can broaden their monitoring to include the environmental disasters from coal, oil, and gas exploration that Khatau sees looming. The government's unplanned exploration of coal is already displacing many households and causing environmental damage in Tharparkar. Believing that locally mined coal should bring benefits to the local people rather than negative impacts, Khatau has started applying his drought-monitoring approach of collecting information and building a larger picture to apprise the government and the people of the situation. This issue, like drought, is not limited to his region–it is linked to many other national projects, especially those related to oil and gas exploration. Khatau sees an informed public action as a means to bringing benefits–employment, infrastructure development, allocation of government budget on social services and development–to the local population. Thus, the communication network based on press clubs and community activists can serve as a key to informed public action as it is doing in relation to drought.

Khatau belongs to the Thar region. During his childhood, he read about Miskin Khan Khoso's efforts to highlight the plight of drought-stricken Tharis by traveling great distances in the region's difficult terrain on foot. Inspired by Khoso's work, Khatau decided to carry on the mission by becoming a correspondent, initially for Jago and since 1990 for Kawish.
Since then, the thoroughness of his investigative reporting, expertise, and news campaigning methods have earned him the confidence of editors and the respect of his journalistic peers. In addition to using his skills to increase awareness of drought, Khatau is also bringing to the mainstream the voices of Thar's low-caste Hindus–whose entrenched subservience stemming from centuries of discrimination and subjugation has deeply disturbed him.