‘Even in the most unlikely places there is beauty’: stories of hope from newsrooms around the world

Roli Srivastava

Founder of the Migration Story, India

Shubham Sabar, 19, was working at a construction site in Bengaluru, capital of India’s southern Karnataka state, when he received a phone call from his teacher back home, hundreds of miles away in Odisha state, telling him he had passed the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (Neet) – India’s tough admissions examination for undergraduate medical and dental colleges.

Snippets of the news reached me on WhatsApp and I commissioned the Odisha-based video journalist Rakhi Ghosh, who walked through farms and forests to reach Sabar’s home in Khordha district. She met Sabar, who had returned home and was getting ready to join the Maharaja Krishna Chandra Gajapati Medical College in Berhampur – about 90 miles (150km) from his village.

Sabar, who was born to farm worker parents, studied late into the night for the exam, which nearly 2.3 million applicants sat. He knew that education was the only way he could help his family and the tribal community in his village, where “people first pray for a cure before seeing a doctor”, as Sabar told Ghosh in the video report.

View image in fullscreen Shubham Sabar achieved a rare feat by passing the Neet. This year nearly 2.3 million applicants sat the exam but barely half of them passed it. Photograph: Rakhi Ghosh/The Migration Story

Like tens of thousands of other Indians, he migrated from his village to work at a construction site to support his family, but also to save money for his higher education.

Children passing highly competitive exams for entry to medicine, engineering or civil services are widely celebrated in India, and coaching classes charge huge su