Debarati Guha

About Debarati Guha

Debarati Guha is the Director, Programs for Asia, at Deutsche Welle (DW), Germany’s international broadcaster.

Born in Kolkata, India, Debarati comes from a multiethnic, multilingual family, and developed an early interest in different cultures, religions, and politics.

For Debarati, personal is political, which is why she likes to tell compelling stories about people’s lives and the challenges they face in society. These interests reflect in her academic training and journalistic career.

She did her MA and MPhil in Political Science at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University and wrote her dissertation on the ‘Representation of Women in Postcolonial literature: Exploring the Subaltern Studies Perspective.’

Debarati started working as a journalist in 2003 as an assistant to the Asia  correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in New Delhi. Later, she completed a training program in online, radio and television journalism at DW and joined its Bengali department as a senior editor and moderator in 2007. After working as the coordinating editor for Bengali, Hindi, and Urdu departments from 2009 to 2012, she was appointed as the Head of DW’s Bengali Service in 2013. In 2015, Debarati was given the responsibility to manage DW’s South and South-East Asian services.

In 2018, she was promoted to the position of the Director Asia Programs, DW.

Currently, she oversees nine Asian language departments, and additionally, Asia Desk – English and German. To hone her skills further as an administrator, Debarati undertook the Executive Management Program by EBU Academy in 2022. In 2023, she was chosen to do a course on ‘Politics of South-East Asia and its impact on Germany’ by the Federal Academy for Security Policy or BAKS. She was awarded as one of the top 10 ‘Women Leader in Germany’ in 2023 by Global Women Leader’ and ‘Most Influential Business Leader’ in 2024 by Business Frontier.

In her two-decade-long journalistic career, Debarati has covered many international political events and has interviewed high-ranking politicians, activists, and intellectuals, including Bangladesh’s Ex-Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, Indian writer and diplomat Shashi Tharoor, and world-renowned economist Professor Amartya Sen.

Apart from journalism, Debarati is involved in research. She also performs with Flinnworks, a Berlin-based theatrical company, to pursue her passion for arts. She has been living in Germany since 2005.