Earlier a police chief made the headlines for her campaign against fake news. Rema Rajeshwari is a fiery IPS officer who has kicked off a high-impact public awareness program targeting the menace of false WhatsApp forwards and malicious news reports in Telangana. She has not only trained and mobilised a team of 500 police officers for the task but leveraged the transformative power of storytelling and theatre to effect a big change in her region.

Growing up in Munnar, Kerala, Rajeshwari wanted to become a civil servant herself, but she didn’t have the support of her parents. "My dreams were very valuable to me and I had to undergo a lot of pressures to achieve by dreams. I did not fail because I had a dream and a target and I did not want to fail,” she said in an interview to Malayala Manorma in 2015.

After she graduated, Rajeshwari worked as a software engineer and then a copywriter in Delhi to support her further education. She topped the Indian Police Service class of 2009 following which she trained at the National Police Academy in Hyderabad under its then director, K Vijay Kumar, who had led the infamous Veerappan case. Rajeshwari started her career in the police service as an assault commander with the Greyhounds – a special task force that undertook high-risk operations through jungle warfare against guerilla groups.

In March 2018, Rajeshwari assumed the role of Superintendent of Police at Jogulamba Gadwal district in Telangana. It was here that she learned about the mayhem caused by fake WhatsApp messages about child kidnappers and murderers in one of the villages in her jurisdiction. It had resulted in mob attacks that had killed many people. That’s when she decided to take matters into her hands.

Rajeshwari first came up with a systematic text message program to counteract the spread of misinformation. But she realised she needed a stronger tool than technology to stay ahead in this race. So she turned to a practice that’s as old as human history: storytelling. Rajeshwari put together a team of folk singers and village drummers to perform songs about identifying and putting an end to the spread of fake news.

According to a report by Bloomberg, there have been no fake news-related deaths in more than 400 villages under Rajeshwari’s control in Telangana. With the upcoming national elections in 2019 and at a time when global superpowers are struggling to deal with the far-reaching consequences of this menacing phenomena, this enterprising police officer’s model might soon be replicated across the country and internationally.