🐘🐆🦍The story behind our award-nominated Vantara investigation

As you may have seen in our earlier newsletters, Himal’s 2024 investigative story on Vantara, the highly controversial wildlife project situated in and around the world’s largest petrochemical refinery at Jamnagar and backed by the billionaire Ambani family, is a finalist for the 2025 Global Shining Light Award – one of the world’s top investigative journalism prizes.

As the award page notes, “this project cast new light on a topic and practice that had been beset by silence among media and policymakers in India. The team employed classic and courageous shoe-leather reporting techniques, as well as solid data analysis and physical visits to remote facilities.” That’s all true – but that’s not all!

This week, I sat down with M Rajshekhar, who reported the story, to talk about how he did it and about the journey of the story since it was published in Himal. And I’m bringing that conversation (lightly edited) to you here as an exclusive Himal newsletter, to show you what it takes to produce journalism of the highest international standards even while Himal continues to struggle for its sustainability and future. 

Himal’s ambition is to continue doing path-breaking investigative work across Southasia even as so much of the media gives up on this kind of work. We rely on you to fund our non-profit independent newsroom and give us the resources to pursue hard-hitting investigations. Become a Himal Patron now to join the good fight – and cheer for us on 23 November as the award is announced in Kuala Lumpur.

With best regards,

Leena 

Leena: Congratulations on making it to the list of award finalists. How do you, with the perspective of a 28-year veteran of journalism, evaluate this story on Vantara?

Shekhar: If we were to measure stories in terms of just pure strangeness, this report is stranger than the rest of any of my reports put together. What are we talking about? We're talking about highly endangered species being housed in a so-called rescue center inside the world's biggest petrochemical refinery – an extraordinarily rapid accumulation of wildlife.

It's generally very easy to attach a framework to whatever we are seeing because things are ultimately comprehensible. If you write on crony capitalism, it's comprehensible – you know what is going on. One guy is getting government favours in return for benefits due to which he's going to make supernormal profits, a part of which will be shared by the policymakers. It's legible. What you're seeing here is absolutely illegible. 

When we wrote our report, they had 4600 animals, and we thought that's a phenomenally large number. Today they have – going by their press release at the start of this year – 78,000 endangered birds and animals in 3000 acres of land.

The other reason why the story stands out is that this is very very clearly the biggest biodiversity story in the world right now. I mean within the larger framework of the mass extinction and so on, but also within the flow of animals globally. I don't think we've seen anything on this scale really. 

India certainly hasn't.

Leena: Please tell us a bit about the reporting process.

Shekhar: So work on this report started around March 2023 and went on till December 2023, when I sort of finally thought that I had everything I needed and I could start writing, and the writing took about two months. I spoke to about 60 people.

The initial round of reporting focused on the places from where the wildlife was coming. The second leg of reporting went a little closer and looked at the sort of policy frameworks in which all of this was operating. And the third leg of reporting took me to Jamnagar. Obviously, I did not have access to the refinery, to Vantara.

I went around the refinery just to sort of get a sense of the place and to talk to locals there.

Leena: Why Himal?

Shekhar: It's a very safe assumption that most Indian publishing houses, most Indian media houses, are not going to take a story like this. At the same time, if you go to some big international publication, they do not have enough skin in the game. So they will want me to cut the story down to 1500 words, which is very hard to do with a report like this. There's too much granular detail and all of it is important. 

I wanted a media house which can appreciate the nuances of writing on a group like Reliance, and has the capability and the interest to do a long-form story, while being relatively immune from the strong-arm tactics that I anticipated would come in response. For those reasons, I went to Himal.

With a really granular investigative report, it's extremely important that you have a very good working dynamic with your editor. I've known Roman, Himal’s Editor, for a while. And I think those are the factors: an editor who is aware of the landscape in which the story is taking place and is insulated from local strong-arm tactics, while being comfortable with long-form itself. So three reasons.

Leena: Does the intensity of the blowback we’ve seen ultimately serve as an indication of the story's underlying importance and validity? Do you think you hit a nerve? 

Shekhar: I have the advantage of having read Paths in the Rainforest by Jan Vansina, which is a history of the forests in Equatorial Africa. The book argues that cognitive reality has to always catch up to physical reality. I have confidence in my process. I think we got the details of the project correct.

I have to now wait for cognitive reality to catch up to physical reality. So when the SIT report came out, it did not trigger doubt.

You know, I'm sure a part of it is the good old male ego, which is very handy in times like this. This is a battle of conflicting narratives right now. So there is a particular image that Reliance is trying to project. There is the other image which is being voiced through investigative reporters, biologists, a bunch of forest officers, a bunch of locals who are aghast at what is happening to their wildlife.

Leena: But I am sure you could not have anticipated or foreseen all the ways the report was attacked. 

Shekhar: At one time, 20 years ago, you would write a report and your biggest concern would be whether the editors would pass the story. We transitioned from there to a time where you would write a story and then readers would see it on social media through a frame of politics, and then you would be battling trolls for a while. Then there was a third stage where you had SLAPP lawsuits and so on and so forth coming through.

With this report, what we found was that the pushback took on multiple legal avatars. The allegation of contempt of court, which was thrown out by the Delhi High Court. Then there were these very strange missives which went out to a bunch of publications asking them to pull down the story. Some of them were under false pretenses like pretending to be a legal firm. 

And so it's been interesting for that reason, that the social life of this story and then its struggle to stay online has been more protracted than any other story of mine.

What you've seen here is more of psychological operations. An attempt to sort of intimidate, demotivate, to make sure that you feel intimidated enough to not follow up on this story, at the very least.

So it's been interesting for that reason as well. Very clearly the story touched a nerve.

Leena: Do you think that, caught in the middle of all the controversies and PR campaigns, the public today is aware of the nuances of this project?

Shekhar: There is a particular shape-shifting quality to what we see at Vantara. If this is a zoo, why isn't it open to the public? If it's a rescue centre, why is it inside the refinery? And why is it doing breeding?

If the Radhe Krishna Temple Elephant Welfare Trust, a component of Vantara, is meant for the welfare of elephants, why does it have other species? 

It puzzles me that each of these features are being normalised and the claims taken at face value instead of getting any kind of critical attention.

I think everybody is falling over backwards trying to port their frameworks onto this to make it legible for themselves: saying this is about carbon trading, this is about DNA collection, or whatever. It's nothing like that. What you have is a private collection! It's very simple. 

The truth is usually pretty obvious. You don't have to look very deep within for ulterior hidden answers or something.

Leena: So you are saying there are no bigger plans for Vantara?

Shekhar: No, no. I don't actually care about these speculations. You know, it's not important to me. My concern is about the supply chains. How are you getting this? What enabled you to go from zero endangered birds and animals to 78,000 in five years?

Leena: I read the CITES report that came out recently. And while it has pointed out the inconsistencies and errors in procurement practices at Vantara, it didn't look like a damning report to me. 

Shekhar: It looks like a minor rap only because you've been watching Arnab Goswami and that degree of performative outrage. If you were to read this in bureaucratese, it's a really harsh report.

They have flagged instances of contradictions and they have mentioned the possibility of payments being made for wildlife. The report is an advisory document to the CITES meeting in Samarkand starting next week, where the parties to the convention will take a call on what has to be done. If India doesn't comply, presumably other forms of trade overseen by CITES could also be penalized.

Leena: Any parting notes for our audience?

Shekhar: If you haven't read the story so far, you should read it now.