Ritu Kapur

Ritu Kapur is Managing Director and Co-Founder, The Quint – India’s leading mobile first digital news platform. Ritu pioneered Citizen Journalism on Indian Television in 2008 when she launched The CJ show on CNN IBN (an English news channel). The platform aimed to democratize news on television, enabling every Indian to contribute and raise issues, using the mobile phone as the news gathering tool. An activist of sorts in her college days (St. Stephen’s College) Ritu’s interest in media for social change was whetted when she did her masters in Film and TV production at the Mass Communication Research Center (MCRC) at Jamia University in New Delhi. Ritu joined Network 18 as a founder member in 1992. She started with producing THE INDIA SHOW, the country’s first local production on a satellite channel, Star plus.

In 1995 Ritu moved to drama on television with a real life docu-drama series, BHANWAR. Recreating landmark cases in Indian legal history, the series won the Jury’s Choice for the Best Investigative series at the Videocon-Screen Awards. Ritu was both director and screenplay writer on the series that ran on Sony Entertainment Channel.

During India’s 2014 general elections Ritu launched several campaigns. The Register To Vote campaign that aimed to educate, empower and enable Indians on their rights as voters, leading to over 75,000 registrations online. The Power of 49, that put together a manifesto for women, such that political parties recognize this 49% of the Indian electorate as a critical vote bank. Ritu was also the Principal Television Advisor on Change India, an initiative headed by Raghav Bahl to draft a policy agenda for the new Prime Minister.

Married to Raghav Bahl, Ritu co-founded The Quint in 2015 and is also a member of the Reuters Institute’s Advisory Board.