Deebashree Mohanty

Deebashree Mohanty is a senior editor at India Today who covers how education systems, workplaces and public institutions shape the lives of ordinary people, with a recurring focus on exams, jobs and the politics of trust.

Education systems, exams and the politics of trust

Mohanty’s most distinctive work centres on crises and accountability in school and higher education, especially where governance failures directly affect students and families. She breaks down how powerful institutions like NCERT and CBSE operate, writing detailed explainers on who drafts textbooks, how chapters are approved and the multiple review layers that precede publication. When those systems malfunction, she follows the fallout: her coverage of NCERT’s textbook errors traces the sequence from corrections to court cases and frames it as a broader “crisis of trust” in one of India’s most relied-upon education bodies.

Her reporting on CBSE treats the board as a political institution as much as an administrative one, documenting how a “holy mess” of Class 12 results, portal crashes and exchanged answer sheets erodes public confidence in India’s biggest school board. In another piece on the CBSE OSM row, she uses the dispute over on-screen marking to show that, despite years of reform rhetoric, Class 12 marks continue to wield hard power over futures and family decisions. Across these stories, she links procedural failures - whether in exam conduct, evaluation or textbook vetting - to structural questions about transparency, autonomy and state oversight in education governance.

Mohanty also follows competitive exams into households, using NEET as a lens on how middle-class aspirations collide with leaks, scarcity of seats and aggressive coaching cultures. In her NEET feature, she builds the narrative through candidates and parents, showing how a single medical seat can drive years of financial and emotional investment, and how exam controversies trigger a sense of betrayal rather than mere inconvenience. As editor of an education vertical, she situates these individual experiences within a wider argument about who benefits from opaque systems and who bears the cost when they break.

Work, layoffs and a split job market

A second through-line in Mohanty’s work is the changing world of jobs, where she treats employment not as a simple hiring story but as a structural split between secure, AI-adjacent roles and precarious, easily automated work. In her feature on the 2026 job crisis, she describes the market as a “see-saw,” with mid-career roles being pruned while junior employees are retained in narrow, stagnant positions, and argues that the era is one of restructuring rather than renaissance.

She maps three clear shifts - intensifying mid-career pruning, stagnant safety for the young and the rise of immediate deployability over pedigree - anchored in interviews with affected professionals and recruiters.

Her reporting on layoffs is unusually granular about process and timing.

In a story on “6 am layoff culture,” she uses a viral post and employee accounts to show how early-morning termination calls are experienced as deliberate isolation, with logins disabled and access revoked before people can seek support. In a companion piece on the “60-day job hunt,” she tracks how laid-off employees feel compelled to treat the search for work as a daily project, documenting routines of sending dozens of applications, practising technical interviews and publicly signalling availability as a survival strategy within visa and notice-period constraints.

Mohanty also brings employer perspectives into the conversation. In her article on Gen Z’s “5 pm and gone” work style, written for the Education Desk, she interviews seven managers and distils a blunt conclusion: most bosses care far more about deliverables than clock-watching, even as they insist on in-person collaboration at key moments. Her piece on India as the “world’s accountant” extends this lens globally, showing how Indian finance and accounting professionals power overseas markets while still being paid like interns, and tying pay gaps to certification, communication and recognition deficits.

Together, these stories give communications-heavy, human detail to debates about layoffs, remote work, productivity and wage justice.

Health, culture and the everyday impact of policy

Beyond education and jobs, Mohanty tracks how health trends and cultural shifts intersect with regulation, risk and commerce. Her coverage of the “Mounjaro bride” phenomenon follows wedding-focused weight-loss through GLP-1 drugs, explaining how weekly injections work, what they cost and the emerging complications doctors are already seeing.

She is explicit about the tension between cosmetic use and medical intent, highlighting the lack of long-term data and the dangers of treating potent peptides as casual pre-wedding rituals.

In a feature on how wars taught societies to “cook without cooking,” she connects battlefield logistics with modern convenience foods, tracing how military needs shaped technologies that later entered kitchens.

Another piece, “Bars and Benches,” explores informal learning spaces like Nerd Nite and “pint of view” evenings, arguing that meaningful learning has moved beyond classrooms into bars and weeknight gatherings where people show up to think together without chasing certificates. These stories show her interest in how culture, commerce and policy decisions reshape everyday habits - what people eat, how they learn, how they care for their bodies - rather than treating health and culture as lifestyle curiosities.

Format and approach: narrative explainers with lived voices

Mohanty’s pieces are typically long-form features or explainers rather than straight spot news, and they rely heavily on lived experience - students, laid-off engineers, managers, doctors - as the backbone of the narrative. She opens with vivid scenes, then moves into structured analysis, often organising stories around a small set of pointed questions or clearly named shifts in the landscape.

Her work blends desk research with interviews and case studies, using quotes from headhunters, clinicians, corporate leaders and exam candidates to ground broader arguments about systems and policy.

Professionally, she is a media practitioner with more than two decades of experience in content generation, news writing and leadership roles, having worked across major media organisations before taking on senior editorial responsibilities at the India Today group. Across beats, the consistent thread is institutional accountability: whether she is unpacking textbook committees, exam boards, corporate HR or aesthetic medicine, her reporting asks who holds power, who bears consequences when things go wrong and how those dynamics are felt in classrooms, offices and clinics.