Manka brings over a decade of journalism experience, much of it spent at The Times of India, where she covered environment and climate change as her primary beat.

Her interest in air pollution began by chance, ten years back, on a reporting trip to a waste dumping site in Nagpur. The assignment had little to do with environment until she saw, up close, the human cost of breathing toxic air.

Years of reporting on the subject taught her that the biggest barrier to climate action isn’t lack of data; it’s how inaccessible it feels to most people. She believes that even the most complex environmental issue can be broken down into something people can relate to. That’s what turns a distant statistic into something people actually talk about.

At Asar, she now works as a Senior Communications Strategist and Programme Support, with a focus on air quality. She aims at building narratives around air quality and climate change that are simple enough to understand but hard to forget.

She has received the Journalist of the Year award from Covering Climate Now at Columbia University, and has also been on the advisory board of Climate Tracker Asia. Based in Nagpur, she is a frequent visitor to the nearby Pench Tiger Reserve. Tiger sighting or not, it remains her happy place.