Chaitanya Kalbag, who started his second stint at the India Today Group three and a half years ago as the editor of four magazines (Business Today, Money Today, Harvard Business Review and Gadgets and Gizmos), has decided to step down from his position and bid adieu to the group.
He will leave the organisation by the end of October. Though his three year contract with the group ended in July this year, he continued his stint to find his successor.
Speaking to afaqs!, Kalbag says that he plans to focus more on writing books, increasing his web presence, teaching and consulting.
He started his career in 1974 and has 40 years of experience.
Before joining India Today for his second stint, between 2008 and 2009, he was publishing director with LexisNexis Butterworths, a publishing house, and was responsible for many books for the bench and the bar.
Kalbag began working as an assistant editor at a Mumbai newspaper for youth, titled Hi. He then edited TransIndia, a news magazine for Indians in the United States and wrote some path breaking stories for New Delhi, a magazine from the ABP Group, before moving to India Today in 1981, where he won the group's first two journalism awards for investigative and human rights reporting.
He later joined Reuters in 1983 and worked there for the next 23 years, reporting on major stories like the Punjab crisis, Operation Blue Star, the Bhopal gas disaster and others. His first overseas assignment was in the Philippines in 1986, where he covered everything from coup attempts to the country's debt crisis.
His last assignment with the global news agency was as managing editor for Asia - the first Asian to head an entire editorial region in Reuters' 151-year history. In this role, he headed a team of 750 journalists in Reuters text, television and picture operations across 35 countries from Afghanistan to New Zealand.
In 2006, he returned to India as editor-in-chief of Hindustan Times.
Kalbag has reported from or worked in China, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, The Philippines, Iran, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Thailand, South Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia and South Africa.
He has also won several awards in his career, including the Rajika Kripalani Young Journalist Award in 1977, the Sanskriti Award for Journalism for 1982, and the India Today-PUCL Human Rights Reporting Award in 1983 for his investigations of fake encounters in Uttar Pradesh and the insurgencies in Northeast India. He was also conferred with the Bharat Shiromani Award in 2007.
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