Aishwarya Dudha

Aishwarya Dudha reports on politics and public life for CBC News, focusing on how decisions and events land on immigrants, people in the justice system and other vulnerable communities. Her work consistently centres justice, cultural issues and lived experience, with an emphasis on voices that are often under-represented in daily news coverage. She draws on experience at national and commercial broadcasters, including CBC News Network and Global News, bringing a broad-news sensibility to regional political and social stories.

Justice, violence and the courts

Dudha’s most distinct line of coverage tracks the human stakes of crime, policing and the court system.

She reports on homicides by leading with family perspectives, as in her piece where the sister of a Saskatoon victim insists her brother is more than “just another name on a list,” placing grief, dignity and systemic concerns at the centre of the story. She covers criminal trials involving historic misconduct in schools, documenting testimony from former administrators and the symbolism of a 1990s paddle photograph to show how institutional culture is being scrutinized in court. Her reporting on a suspicious device found on a First Nation follows the full response from RCMP while acknowledging the specific risks and anxieties facing the community, joining police procedure with Indigenous context rather than treating it as a generic incident.

She also covers fatal crashes and rare deaths such as the bear attack that killed mixed martial arts fighter Hrishikesh Koloth at a remote uranium exploration camp, blending timelines of events with employer and work-site details so that safety, labour and justice questions sit alongside the immediate tragedy.

Municipal policy, housing and climate

Dudha frequently uses local politics as a frame to examine housing precarity, public space and environmental commitments. In her coverage of a Saskatoon encampment cleanup plan, she reports the city’s strategy while giving weight to a neighbour’s description of the plan as “a Band-Aid on a bullet hole,” showing how residents read municipal actions against the scale of homelessness around them. Her piece on the city’s net-zero emissions trajectory tracks official pledges to keep cutting emissions with or without broader support, tying climate targets to governance, budget decisions and the tension between long-term policy and short-term political pressures.

She reports on the reopening of a high school months after a major fire, describing the return of students to a building missing dozens of classrooms and facilities, which underlines how infrastructure failures and rebuilding decisions affect daily life rather than appearing only as abstract capital projects.

Economic decisions and local development

Economic policy and investment stories in Dudha’s file are treated as political choices with direct consequences for workers and neighbourhoods. When Ottawa allocates $11.6 million in tariff relief to eight Saskatoon companies, she breaks down which firms benefit, the kinds of costs being offset and how those decisions fit into broader conversations about trade, competitiveness and local employment. Her reporting on a long-awaited spa development at the Willows follows the project’s extended timeline to construction, noting how residents and businesses respond to a significant new build in their area and situating the story in ongoing debates over land use and urban growth. In the bear-attack coverage at the Zoo Bay uranium property, she connects the death of Koloth to contract work and resource exploration operations, highlighting how industrial projects bring in migrant labour and create distinct safety and oversight questions for isolated communities.

Human stories of sport, health and disability

Dudha also builds out a strand of human-interest reporting around sport, health and disability that keeps policy present without overshadowing personal narratives. Her profile of Olympic-bound athlete Maïa Schwinghammer traces a path from early training on frozen lakes to the international stage, mixing biography with the systems that support elite competitors from the Prairies.

In covering the crash that killed Roughriders linebacker and team captain Jayden Dalke, she balances details of the collision with the player’s role and legacy, making clear how a single event reverberates through a major sports institution and its supporters. Her story on University of Saskatchewan physical therapy students who volunteer to walk with seniors presents health care as a community practice, showing how students, older residents and public spaces intersect in practical efforts to improve mobility and reduce isolation.

In a piece on a Saskatoon family that raised $370,000 so their daughter who uses a wheelchair can play with her friends, she documents fundraising, design and planning while keeping the child’s experience central, embodying her stated focus on elevating vulnerable voices within civic and political narratives.

Across these strands, Dudha’s coverage distinguishes itself by holding policy, law and economics close to the lived reality of people affected by them, with particular attention to immigrants, Indigenous communities, people navigating disability and families dealing with loss. Her politics beat is defined less by legislative process than by the ways decisions on justice, housing, climate and development are felt on the ground.