Shaikh R.

Stigma stymies India's leprosy battle

India has as many as 130,000 new cases of leprosy each year. Although early drug intervention can arrest the disease’s ruinous impact, but many newly- infected people worry about being ostracized, and hide their condition for years until they start to become disabled. I visited a specialized leprosy treatment center near Kolkata, where doctors explained that it's unnecessary to ostracize patients.

• Documentary DP
• News Shooter / Video Journalist
• Reporter / Journalist

VOA — Arsenic poisoning in West Bengal's shallow wells

The switch from traditional dug wells to "tube wells"—in which a pipe is drilled into an aquifer — proved fatal in the 1990s, when a high level of arsenic contamination was detected in water from tube wells in Bangladesh and in eastern India. Nowadays, surface ponds provide a safer source of water.

• Documentary DP
• News Shooter / Video Journalist

VOA — In India, Surplus drugs reach the neediest via ‘Medicine Baba’

• Documentary DP
• News Shooter / Video Journalist
• Field Producer

The Guardian — Plan to move refugees to remote island prompts fears of catastrophe

The Bangladeshi government’s revised proposals to relocate tens of thousands of Rohingya refugees to a remote island that appeared only eight years ago, and floods at high tide, threaten to trigger a humanitarian catastrophe, human rights groups warn. Government officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, have described the low-lying island of Thengar Char, as uninhabitable.

• Reporter / Journalist

The Guardian — Burmese military killed 7 of my children, refugee says

Noor Ayesha's report is one of a wave of reports of murder and rape by soldiers in Myanmar, amid claims of genocide. “Five of my children were burnt to death by the soldiers," she said. "They killed my two daughters after raping them. They also killed my husband and raped me.” The atrocity, one of many, took place in the village of Kyet Yoe Pyin, in Maungdaw township of Myanmar's Rakhine state.

• Reporter / Journalist