BehanBox Wishlist 2025: The Stories That Could Have Been
A bucket list of stories that we will carry with us in 2026
As a small independent media house, we strive to report on gender and marginality with depth and rigour – and what an incredible year this has been (stay tuned for this month’s Postscript edition). But reporting on a story is just the beginning. We believe attention and care must extend beyond the moment of publication. This allows us time and space to reflect on the process of reporting and the many possibilities of a story. And to pay attention to ideas and questions that demand further exploration.
At BehanBox, we believe in the afterlife of the story. So we asked some contributors to reflect on the stories they told and those they wish they could. These are their reflections – an exercise in remembering, hoping, and imagining stories that need attention – and as such become a wish list for 2026. What you see below is a desire to keep listening, nurture relationships, and remain attentive to people and systems even when the news cycle moves on. We hope to do more of this; this wish list is meant to be unfinished.
As you peer through our longings, we invite you to send us your own wish list as readers: what ideas and questions would you want us to explore in the new year? Our hearts and inboxes are always open. Write to us at contact@behanbox.com or send us a message on any of our social channels.
The Tug-Of-War Between Time And Money
In August, I came across Ranchi-based lawyer and founder of Hashiya Socio-Legal Centre, Apurva Vivek’s LinkedIn post on how Jharkhand became the first state in India to mention access to abortion in its newly notified jail manual. I immediately got in touch, and she generously took the time for a conversation. I had initially wanted to write on the new manual in Jharkhand, but something Apurva mentioned during our conversation stuck with me.
She had asked why stories about abortion access aren’t covered extensively in mainstream news publications. She had spoken to many journalists about the manual, but a story on it was yet to be published.
In India, where 67% of abortions are considered unsafe, leading to about eight deaths a day, it’s troubling to see the lack of attention to it in the media. So, I felt the need to do an expansive story on the lack of access to abortion rights for incarcerated women across India. This would mean visiting women or indirectly talking (through letters) to women in prisons who had sought an abortion and the barriers they faced. Factors such as caste, further reduce access to basic rights of women from marginalised communities, which are underreported. I also want to talk to women in open prisons to understand whether there is a difference in access to abortion rights.
However, as an independent journalist, there is a constant tug-of-war between aspiration to do passion projects and in-depth stories that require considerable time, attention and resources and the reality of a stable and decent income – a challenge that would ease if our models of journalism and knowledge production were paid better and more resources were available.
And this struggle is age-old, even in fiction. Last week, a journalist friend reminded me of the real tragedy in the book Little Women: when the central protagonist, Jo March, wins a $100 prize for a short story. More than 150 years later, freelance rates have barely budged.
But, as I told Apurva, I’ll definitely write about this soon, so this won’t stay on my wishlist for too long.
Aisiri Amin
[Aisiri wrote a two part story on Karnataka’s port push and how women in Honnavar and Keni have been resisting it for decades. These stories, while questioning the logic of development at the cost of communities, offer a reflection on home, community, memory and work. Read them here.]
Giving Stories The Time They Deserve
The past year has been a journey through the intersection of gender, protection, and the revival of commons, and I’ve genuinely cherished reporting each story.
Yet, after every reportage, there’s a lingering thought: If only I had spent more time with the community, perhaps there was another detail waiting to be uncovered, another voice I could have heard. As journalists, even when we choose to write long-form stories, the clock is always ticking. We chase deadlines and budgets dictate the length of our stay, and we often leave with the sense that the landscape still holds stories we didn’t get the chance to listen to.
With every passing year, I realise that time, which is dedicated and unrushed, is what truly shapes meaningful journalism. The more we immerse ourselves in people’s daily rhythms, their unspoken routines, the more nuance we gain. It’s in those unplanned conversations, in the pauses between interviews, in the early-morning chores or late-evening gatherings, that the real colour of a story emerges.
As I look ahead, I hope to carve out more of that space, to slow down, to listen longer, and to honour the stories that unfold only when we give them the time they deserve.
Aishwarya Mohanty
[Aishwarya Mohanty has been a regular contributor to BehanBox with her incisive ground reports. This year, she wrote four stories for our project “Climate Leaders: Women in Local Action.” This year, she also won a Laadli award for reporting on gender issues for her story on Koraput’s women cartographers.]
‘I Want To Document The Beginnings Of A Movement’
I’ve really wanted to return to reporting on homelessness but couldn’t. During my years working on housing rights, I often worked with homeless people. Last year, I tried to revisit the issue of homelessness by exploring how homeless women are especially vulnerable to extreme heat and how they coped. But what has stayed with me far more deeply are the moments inside the shelters: the longing, love, fights, and the sisterhood I witnessed.
Many women spoke of fleeing abusive families or relationships. “Humko toh chod diya,” they’d say. And somehow Delhi’s shelters became the only place they could rebuild their lives. I want to tell that story: how women navigate homeless shelters amid the city’s housing crisis, how they pursue aspirations, manage new relationships, and live through both the hope and chaos of life in a shelter. That’s a story still on my wishlist.
Going back to Kutch is also high on my list. The conversations I had with women salt workers still sit with me. Their testimonies about labour, family dynamics, and how income flows within the household — especially in a business where the “unit” is the family, not the individual — have stayed unresolved in my mind. I want to dig deeper into how these women claim their stakes in the profession and what financial autonomy looks like for them.
And finally, this year in Jaipur, while working with domestic workers, I learned how India’s first domestic workers’ union emerged –not around wages, but around violence. I truly want to document the beginnings of this movement and what it has evolved into today.
Anuj Behal
[Anuj Behal has written extensively on women workers, especially migrant women workers in India’s cities. This year, his story on evictions in Delhi and what it means for women workers, won the Laadli media award for gender reporting.]
Looking For All The Lonely People
Over the last year I opened one page on my Notion about 121 times, shared it with two friends, spent hours on its corners, thinking about the one human condition that baffles and beguiles and beholds us all. ‘The Loneliness Project’ I call it. As someone interested in thinking about digital cultures, communities, and care, I’ve been wanting to write about what it means to be lonely in India today. Do we have the language to define it, where does it find space in our home and hearts? What inequalities, policies, hierarchies led us to this point, and can empathy decide where we go from here?
Then came machines who wanted to be our friends, therapists, partners. A survey found more than half of young Indians used AI “emotionally”, and young women were far more likely to use chatbots for connection, for sharing thoughts without inhibition. Last month while at the airport, I saw a woman sitting in front of me copying and pasting her ex-boyfriend’s message on ChatGPT, asking its grey persona: “Is he breaking up with me or is there hope?”
Chatbots as cheap, accessible confessionals, offering a respite from uncertainty and refuge from being alone – I saw the appeal. But I’ve also seen, as I report on digital labour, that there is loneliness on both sides of the computer: the people powering these AI-assisted companions are exhausted, trapped, alienated too.
I want to come back to it in the new year, because tech-mediated intimacy and connection is the beginning of a larger story of grief and power. I want to ask the machines and its makers: do you encode empathy, do you train machines to offer resources and resilience in the long run, instead of coddling people? To the people: do you worry about your privacy, or about the people powering these machines? What communities and spaces would you need to feel like you belong? And to the systems that enable this shift: What is the cost of replacing what is a human need for connection with technology designed to benumb us and extract finite resources that enable life?
Alongside the many joys of working in an independent media space today, there is also remorse, of sometimes, setting aside stories that deserve more attention than they currently get. Let 2026 be the year I go looking for all the lonely people.
Saumya Kalia
[Saumya Kalia’s extensive reportage on women in the platform economy in India has led to significant contributions to gig workers’ advocacy. Her reportage has been used as inputs to draft Karnataka’s labour policy and gig work legislation. This year, she also chose to focus on the new frontier of women in data work.]
‘Keep Questioning, Keep Conversing’
This year I did not report as much as I would have liked to because of my full-time non-journalism job. However I am glad that there were some crucial stories that I wrote this year both for BehanBox and other media outlets– cancer centres that have successfully slashed childhood cancer rates, how women construction workers struggle to access maternity benefits, the impact of USAID cuts on TB treatment in India and on the phenomenon of Delhites moving out of the city due to air pollution.
While reporting the story on women construction workers and maternity benefits for BehanBox, I could see the gap between the intended policy and actual implementation. There are enough state and central schemes that are designed to care for the worker’s wellbeing during the maternity period and after but most women can’t access the schemes due to various hurdles. This is why the work we do is important — to understand from the actual beneficiaries about the web of bureaucracy they have to navigate, countering lofty government claims. So my learning for the new year is to keep questioning, keep conversing and never losing sight of the big picture of our purpose.
I would have loved to do more regular health stories reported from the ground like the story of India’s success in TB control – 21% reduction in new cases and 28% reduction in deaths between 2015 and 2024 – the factors that helped achieve this and yet how far away we are from meeting India’s goal of TB elimination. I also wanted to report on the cough syrup tragedy in Madhya Pradesh and the government policies that allow adulterated cough syrup manufacturers to go scot-free. There are other stories that I couldn’t do but remain seeds for my future work.
Swagata Yadavar
[Swagata Yadavar’s three part series on cancer in India shone a spotlight on the gaps in cancer care for women–from medical diagnosis to care policies, including palliative care. Her reports have been integrated into an Illinois school’s permanent curriculum of Capstone Course.]
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