Ketaki Gokhale is a health reporter for Bloomberg, based in Mumbai. She recently received a WASH Media Award for a story she co-wrote about menstrual hygiene in India.
In Depth recently spoke with Ketaki about her award-winning work and her thoughts on the rapidly evolving health industry in Asia.
You recently received a WASH Media Award for a story you co-wrote about menstrual hygiene in India. Congratulations! What does it mean to you to win the award?
Winning the award is personally exciting and a great reward after days of tromping through villages in rural Bihar — but what’s more significant is dialogue it spurs around the issue of menstrual hygiene. Having modern means of dealing with menstruation is something we take for granted in developed countries. It’s stories like ours (and the awards definitely help!) that shine a bit of light on the very different world that’s the reality for hundreds of millions of Indian women. As the JPAL researcher in our story says, “Going to these villages is like going back in time.”
How did you go about developing this story? What are some of the challenges you faced reporting on such a sensitive issue?
This story was a cross-country and -continent team effort. My colleague in Hong Kong and I worked with editors in Melbourne and Paris to develop the ideas and turn our reporting into a narrative. The hardest part for me was definitely talking to rural women about a subject they really weren’t all that comfortable chatting about. Also — reassuring wary and sometimes aggressive husbands that we weren’t a threat.
Reporting and writing this piece was a collaborative effort. What were the benefits of working as part of a team? What were the challenges you faced?
There are really only benefits to working as a team, but it’s one of the hardest things to master. My colleague Natasha (Khan) did a brilliant job of fleshing out the meaning and significance of India’s menstrual hygiene management crisis, while I was able to dig in to the on-the-ground reporting that built the narrative. The result of working as a team was that the final product was better, and the process moved more quickly and efficiently as a result of multitasking.
What do you see as the key future storylines to watch in health care in Asia, particularly in India? What trends do you think will be important over the next five years?
Covering the health beat is interesting because there is both a business and numbers component, and a human component to every story we do on the team.
In terms of what to watch on health in India, I think that India’s public health system is going to come under a lot of international scrutiny in the coming years, especially considering that India’s public hospitals are failing India’s vast sea of poor.
The privatization of healthcare in India is also a trend to watch — and how well this will work for different income groups. India also has a thriving generic drug industry, which is a key supplier of cheap drugs to the U.S. The industry has had its share of run-ins with the FDA and faces questions over quality. How they address those concerns will also be interesting.