Dayamani Barla

Dayamani Barla is an Indian tribal journalist and activist from the Indian state of Jharkhand. She became notable for her activism in opposing Arcelor Mittal's steel plant in Eastern Jharkhand that tribal activists say would displace forty villages.

Barla has won a number of prestigious awards for journalism. She unsuccessfully ran from the Khunti Lok Sabha Constituency, Jharkhand in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections as an Aam Aadmi Party candidate.

Early life Dayamani was born in a tribal family (also known as Adivasi in India) in the Jharkhand state of eastern India. Her family belonged to the Munda tribe. Dayamani's father, like other tribals in the region, was cheated out of his property because he could not read and lacked paperwork to show his rights to the land. Her father became a servant in one city, and her mother a maid in another. Barla remained in school in Jharkhand but worked as a day laborer on farms from the 5th to 7th grades. To continue her education through secondary school, she moved to Ranchi and worked as a maid to pay her way through university. She sometimes slept at railway stations in order to continue her education in journalism.

Career Barla works in a popular Hindi newspaper to bring attention to myriad problems facing the Munda people and other tribal communities in the Jharkhand region. She is the National President of Indian Social Action Forum INSAF. Her early journalistic work was supported by a small fellowship through the Association for India's Development (AID).

Awards

Barla won the Counter Media Award for Rural Journalism in 2000 and the National Foundation for India Fellowship in 2004. Counter Media Award is funded by royalties from journalist P. Sainath's book Everyone Loves a Good Drought, and is meant for rural journalists whose (often outstanding) work gets ignored or even appropriated by the larger press at the state or national level in India. In 2013, she was the recipient of the Ellen L. Lutz Indigenous Rights Award instituted by Cultural Survival, an international NGO. In 2023, she was named the Greeley Peace Scholar by the University of Massachusetts Lowell.