By Jose Kavi

New Delhi, Dec 14, 2025: The Press Club of India on December 14 made history by electing the first woman to head the largest and most significant body of journalists in the country.

Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty, who was until recently the National Affairs Editor of The Wire, a digital news service, recorded a landslide victory when the annual elections results were announced in the evening at the club lawns by election commissioner MMC Sharma and his team.

Sangeeta’s team swept all five posts of office bearers and 16 managing committee members in the elections held the previous day.

Sangeeta, as she is popularly known, scored 1,019 of the 1,237 votes polled.

Sangeeta, the New Delhi-based native of the northeastern Indian state of Assam, has won critical acclaim for the documentation on the Assam Movement, the Assam Accord and the insurgencies in her state in her debut book Assam: The Accord, The Discord.

She was formerly a special correspondent of the English language national newspaper The Hindu. A year after graduation from the Guwahati University in 1995, she began her journalism career at the national news agency United News of India (UNI). She was the first woman from northeastern India to work at the agency’s New Delhi headquarters.

Sangeeta has been the recipient of a fellowship from the Centre for Development Studies since 2011 following her series of news stories on the loss of livelihood caused by soil erosion on Assam’s Majuli island.

In 2017, she received the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Awards for her reportage on housing segregation among Hindus and Muslims in the national capital.

She is married to Mohan Pisharoty, who was her Malayali colleague in the UNI. They have a daughter who is now in Canada.

Among her team members are Jatin Gandhi, vice president, and Afzal Imam, general secretary. Aditi Rajput as treasurer and P R Sunil Kumar as joint secretary were elected unopposed. Aditi is the first woman treasurer of the club.

Press Club of India is an association of journalists and media professionals in New Delhi. It was founded by Durga Das, editor of the Hindustan Times, in 1957.

Das used to visit London in the 1930s as a reporter of the Associated Press of India. He was inspired by the London Press Club to start a similar model in India.

The Press Club of India was set up on December 20, 1957. It was incorporated on March 10, 1958 and was inaugurated on February 2, 1959 with just 30 members by then Home Minister Govind Ballabh Pant.

Das was elected the founding president and D R Mankekar first secretary-general.