Cover picture credits: Pramiti Negi

Chander Ram (77) vividly recalls the three high Himalayan passes leading into Tibet, as if it were just yesterday that he was trudging them with his mules and goats. When the Indo-China war broke out in 1962, Chander was caught in its crosshairs, right in the middle of the Gyannim Mandi, one of Tibet’s largest trading outposts of the day. 

But he made it out of there safely. His escape makes for a great story, and Beena Nitwal (42) was intent on documenting this piece of oral history before it got lost in time, just like so many other stories hidden in the folds of the mountains. 

Beena belongs to the Bhotia community, native to the villages of Kumaon. She identifies as a Himal Prakriti Fellow alumna— the Himal Prakriti Storytelling Fellowship runs for six months, training mountain people in remote pockets of the Indian Himalayan region to document their own stories. 

Beena has never travelled beyond her village of Shankhdhura, but her stories have. They are steadily making their way across the world in the form of URLs, through the videos and articles that go up on Voices of Rural India. 

A camera pans around a simple home in Sarmoli village of Uttarakhand. At first, it seems like a travel vlog. Closer inspection will reveal that it is one, a raw, real account and depiction of Deepak Pachhai’s home turned homestay in the mountains. 

A conversation with Deepak (23) reveals this isn’t his first video story. It is his second, he shares with pride. “My first-ever video story was on the van panchayats (community-based institutions for managing forest commons unique to Uttarakhand). I wanted to talk about the mahila chowkidars (the women who patrol the forest) and the struggles they face,” Deepak shares. 

As the panoramic video continues playing, Deepak explains that, for someone who wasn’t savvy with filming, editing, or production, making his own mini vlog was a distant dream. 

“I first learned how to use my phone camera efficiently, including camera angles, then eventually I learnt editing. I learnt how to not just take pictures and videos, but also how to put them together to tell a visual story,” he says. Deepak was one of the Fellows of the second batch of the Himal Prakriti Storytelling Fellowship programme in 2024. “I felt so happy the day my first video was published on Voices of Rural India for the world to see. It was a huge achievement for me,” he says. 

As Malika Virdi, the co-founder of Voices of Rural India, shares, this storytelling web portal was born out of the COVID-19-induced lockdown of 2020. 

“During that one year of........

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