Kabir is an award-winning independent journalist who has contributed to the South China Morning Post, Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Caravan magazine, Al Jazeera and worked for several years at The Wire - India’s leading independent news site.
His reportage has focussed on development issues — food security, agriculture, climate change, migration, water, health and human rights. Kabir's work has also revolved around business and finance, from covering the bad loans crisis in India to ESG analysis of some of the world's largest corporations and pension funds. His work has been cited by international scholars in books and journal papers with almost 100 citations to date.
His work reviewing government policies on water, housing, health, food security, climate change, and agriculture has won recognition globally. A series of his reports, for instance, shone a light on the various shortcomings on the Indian government's policy that aimed to address the open defecation challenge. He also uncovered, for the first time in the history of India, the political sensitive list of corporate houses who have not paid their loan dues despite having the financial ability to do so.
He is a multi-platform journalist and his work has included filming video interviews, video stories and hosting a podcast series on climate change and food policy
Most recently, he was part of two global collaborative investigative projects: The Pegasus Project, The Congo Hold-up and Hunger Profiteers.
Alongside his work as a reporter and journalist, Kabir has also had extensive experience as a researcher and consultant where his work has included advising local governments on raising urban infrastructure finance, resolving the affordable housing crisis and issues of sustainable finance. He has co-authored a boon about Mumbai's affordable housing problem and journal problems on solving the urban housing question.
Awards, fellowships & grants include
- Berlin Energy Transition Dialogue Fellowship (2020): as a media fellow with a focus on India's clean energy transition
- Society of Environment Journalists’ grant: for stories on the destruction of the natural habitat of migratory birds in northeast India
- Water Aid's media fellowship: to report on the water crisis in urban India
- Red Ink Award (2018): for excellence in business and economy journalism for his reportage on farmer suicides in India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh
Some of Europe's largest pension funds are investing billions of euros in volatile commodity markets, risking the hard-earned income of millions of workers while fuelling a global hunger crisis caused in part by such investments, a new investigation has f...
New Delhi/London/Rome: Food prices have climbed to unprecedented levels in recent months, adding to an already precarious food security situation in large parts of the developing world. The report blamed the "toxic triple combination" of climate change, the economic effects of the pandemic and over the past two years.
New Delhi: The phone numbers of over 40 Indian journalists appear on a leaked list of potential targets for surveillance, and forensic tests have confirmed that some of them were successfully snooped upon by an unidentified agency using Pegasus spyware, The Wire can confirm.
Indian farmers, many of whom have been engaged for more than six months in protests against new agricultural laws passed by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government, are angry. Some have referred to their protest as the largest such mobilization in human history.
New Delhi: Insurance companies have missed the deadline to recognise and pay claims worth over Rs 5,000 crore made by farmers under the Centre's Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) scheme, according to data obtained by through right to information (RTI) requests.
'Prima facie this looks very much like a climate change event,' says UN author.
It was more than six months ago that Indian farmers started protesting against three new laws pushed in unilaterally by the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The laws aim to change the way agricultural markets operate. But, from the very beginning, the protests have not been only about the intricacies of those laws.
New Delhi: Four years after the Supreme Court first directed the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to disclose a list of India's wilful defaulters, the central bank has finally complied. In response to a Right to Information (RTI) application filed by The Wire in May 2019, the RBI has released a list of 30 major wilful defaulters.
Muzaffarnagar: On the afternoon of January 6, 2017, Meenu Singh (39) was at home in Matheri, a small nondescript village comprising 950 people in Muzaffarnagar district, washing utensils after having served lunch to her family of five - her husband, her two teenaged daughters and her 10-year-old son.
Kabir Agarwal from The Wire is in Madrid, Spain, to cover COP25. Follow our coverage of this important event here. Madrid: People holding up banners and posters with text in all caps greeted delegates as they walked in for day four of negotiations at COP 25.