There are 2.5 million to 50 million refugees and internally displaced people in South Asia. Earlier this year, DW Akademie, the Calcutta Research Group and the Center for International Media Assistance met with journalists, academics and rights activists – all stakeholders there – to discuss the issue of reporting in displacement settings.

Babita Basnet, an editor at a weekly newspaper in Nepal, has observed policies that ignore women and their critical need for reliable information. She says that many women in Nepal are obligated to migrate abroad for economic reasons but that poverty and cultural stigmas trail them. Media, she believes, can raise awareness and inform would-be migrants or displaced persons.

Scarce information or disinformation on displacement remains a problem, says Mohammad Reyaz, an assistant journalism professor at Aliah University, India. Muslims, he notes, who migrate within India for economic reasons or because they have been displaced due to natural disasters, are often falsely accused of being illegally in the country. The media can, and should, better explain their stories.

A New York Times contributor for South Asia, Zia Ur-Rehman has observed that Pakistani media shy away from reporting on migration and displacement. Therefore most Pakistanis themselves have a limited understanding of the crisis in their country which hosts several million Afghan refugees. Stories, he says, often portray displaced persons as criminals and responsible for their own predicament.

Iqbal Khattak founded Freedom Network, a media watchdog group, in 2013. He says that in Pakistan, mass displacement and refugee camps have been a crisis for nearly half a century, starting with the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. For him, it is the media's job to draw attention to suffering and to investigate how the host country assists and integrates displaced people and migrants.

In nearly 20 years working in Afghan media, including as Ariana TV’s managing director, Khushal Asefi's work focused on his country's turbulence both during and after Taliban rule. Asefi fled Afghanistan in August 2021, and his resettlement in Germany has personalized migration's hardships. He observes that refugees often resist sharing their stories with the media, fearing arrest or deportation.

Sulochana Ramiah Mohan is Ceylon Today’s deputy editor in Sri Lanka, as well as a contributor to Asahi Shimbun in Japan. She reports on international relations, migration and displacement, the climate, and social justice, among other topics. She notes that statistics on internal displacement in Sri Lanka are unreliable, though economic and political crises have forced many residents to flee.

Dr. Lopita Nath chairs the History Department and directs the Asian Studies Program at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas. Nath focuses on migration in Asia, refugees, and human rights and serves on the Catholic Charities Refugee Advisory Board. Her current research is on Bhutanese refugee resettlement in the United States.