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As the sweep of “Slumdog Millionaire” in last year’s Academy Awards amply underscored, the story of modern India is a riveting and inspiring one.

With a teeming population of 1.1 billion people, the world’s oldest culture and its biggest democracy embraces the worst and best of humanity. But most of all, it has become a land of personal and economic miracles—miracles that are already remaking the subcontinent as one of the dominant forces of the 21st Century.

And one of those fields of dominance is the media. India has not only become an incredible news story, it is pushing the frontiers of print and broadcast journalism. While America’s newspapers are downsizing and dying, they’re proliferating in India, where a dramatic rise in the literacy rate is creating millions of news-hungry readers every year. Meanwhile, broadcast channels are multiplying even as cyber entrepreneurs launch Websites to tap into the zeal of citizen journalists, many of whom have turned into local Woodwards and Bernsteins by using the country’s new Right to Information Act to watch over government spending and misdeeds.

As never before, India needs highly trained and aggressive young journalists. And the Indian Institute of Journalism & New Media (IIJNM), a pioneering journalism college in Bangalore has dedicated itself to meeting that need through its unique one-year, Master’s level residential program. The strength of the IIJNM program is that it uses its hometown of Bangalore, India’s Silicon Valley, as the real-life laboratory for all reporting assignments. As a result, IIJNM students and graduates are prepared to rise quickly to the top of the profession.

For instance, four out of the ten students who qualified for the prestigious CNN Aspiring Journalist Awards last year were from IIJNM. The Institute also boasts the first graduate of any journalism college in India to be hired for a New York Times internship—Tamara D’Mello, Class of 2002. Vivek Gupta, also Class of 2002, served a four-month Scripps Howard internship in Washington D.C. before returning home to work as a copy editor for the Times of India, the world’s largest English-language daily newspaper. Supriya Khandekar, an IIJNM alumnus, won this year’s prestigious Young Development Journalist of the Year Award given by the Asian Development Bank Institute (ADBI).

Students are not limited to post-graduate internships; during their tenure at IIJNM, opportunities abound for placement in local media organizations. These experiences and connections may prove invaluable as they graduate and move forward with their professional careers. You see IIJNM alumni all the time on television; you read their bylines in newspapers, magazines and websites; and you listen to them on radio.

“What I liked about my year at IIJNM was that I was given the freedom to choose news stories I wanted to work on, and excel in whatever I was doing,” says Deborah Grey, now at CNN-IBN, India’s leading 24-hour news channel.

Prospective bosses are very pleased as well.

 “We are happy customers,” declared Piyush, Executive Editor at ANI, which has employed five IIJNM students. Added A.V.S. Namboodiri, Senior Associate Editor at the Deccan Herald of Bangalore: "Your students are well-trained."

IIJNM offers first-rate facilities on a modernist campus, equipped with broadband, a television studio, video editing labs and a computer lab. The curriculum has been developed in association with Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. This year IIJNM has begun a new multi-media program that streamlines and converges the various branches of journalism in a cutting edge format. Print, television, radio and the web are synthesized in an all-in-one offering that trains the students on how to best utilize new and emerging technology for the 21st century.

Most importantly, it offers personalized instruction from a cadre of full- and part-time faculty members that have included Fulbright scholars; Knight Fellows from the U.S., Europe, Cambodia, Egypt and Bangkok; a Pulitzer Prize finalist; the lead business journalist on the Union Carbide tragedy in Bhopal; one of India’s foremost experts on developmental issues; the creator of Al-Jazeera’s immensely popular Website and a number of former print reporters, editors and broadcasters with decades of experience in both Indian and foreign media. Guest lecturers have included Thomas Friedman, columnist for The New York Times, and Susan King of the Carnegie Foundation.

Under the faculty’s guidance, students are drilled on the practical aspects of newsgathering, a decidedly daunting task in India. Unlike other Indian journalism schools that teach mainly theory, IIJNM shuttles students two days a week to Bangalore for on-the-ground story assignments. Upon their return, they churn out stories that find their way into the campus newspaper and, in a few cases, into the mainstream press. In 2008-2009, IIJNM print students had articles in The Hindu and the Deccan Chronicle. Publication isn’t limited to students; one of IIJNM visiting faculty members wrote about India’s Right to Information Act for the Jan/Feb 2009 Columbia Journalism Review.

The results of IIJNM’s approach are obvious. The school has enjoyed nearly universal success placing its students in professional jobs. For American students, that would translate into a second chance to work, a chance to enter a media market that is expanding rather than contracting. Moreover, IIJNM offers its top-notch curriculum at a fraction of the cost of high quality U.S. journalism schools. But there are other rewards, as well. In addition, American students would enjoy a year-long, cross-cultural feast, one that will help them build an international network as they pursue their journalism careers in tomorrow’s interdependent world.

Celebrated as it was, Slumdog Millionaire was sheer fantasy. But journalistic opportunities at IIJNM for the adventurous foreign students are reality at its best.  

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