Rhitu Chatterjee

Rhitu Chatterjee is a digital editor at National Public Radio in Washington D.C., where she edits stories about food for NPR’s The Salt blog. Before coming to NPR, she was based in New Delhi as a contributing correspondent for PRI’s The World, a daily radio show on international news that is co-produced by the BBC World Service, Public Radio International and WGBH Radio.

Rhitu specializes in stories about science, the environment, global health, development and places where they intersect. She has covered the legacy of the world’s largest industrial disaster, the Bhopal gas tragedy of 1984 and how it spurred American communities into action. She has reported on efforts to restore the banks of one of India’s most polluted rivers, the Yamuna. She has also investigated a mysterious kind of chronic kidney disease that has affected farming communities in parts of India and Sri Lanka. She has also reported extensively on gender issues in India. Going beyond breaking news about gender violence, she documented how Indian men and women are grappling with shifting gender roles.

Rhitu has received two reporting grants from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting to investigate India and Brazil’s free school lunch programs, two of the world’s largest programs to provide free meals to poor school children in those countries. Her work has won her nominations for South Asian Journalism Association’s journalism awards.

Before her time in India, Rhitu was a science correspondent with The World. She did her undergraduate work in Darjeeling and she holds an M.A. in journalism from the University of Missouri, Columbia.