Mukul Devichand: Biography

Mukul Devichand's journalistic career began in the streets of Cairo in the weeks following September 11, 2001. He moved there to report for the region's leading English-language weekly newspaper.

Learning Arabic and covering the tense Middle East on the eve of the Iraq invasion was a baptism of fire for the young Welsh-born journalist.

In 2003, he co-produced a prize-winning documentary film Captive Audience while living and studying in New York City on a coveted Fulbright scholarship to Columbia University. The film told how Muslim missionaries funded by Saudi Arabia were working in US prisons. It is a topic Mukul has returned to on several occasions since, aiming to open up the raging and often subtle debates within Islam to wider audiences.

In 2004 he began his career at BBC Current Affairs in London. He spent almost 3 years on Panorama before going on to become one of the youngest presenters on flagship radio series such as Analysis, Crossing Continents and Law in Action.

His favourite assignments include looking at how globalisation has altered the politics of language in his home country Wales, and understanding the way green activism is challenging the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing. He also merrily puffed away on Shisha pipes across England for a BBC Asian Network Report about the impending smoking ban in public places.

As a producer for Crossing Continents he has travelled undercover, by road and canoe, to meet insurgents in India's troubled North-Eastern state of Manipur; and to the "bandit villages" of Eastern Siberia, where illegal logging to serve Chinese demand threatens the world's largest forests.

For his first Crossing Continents as on-air reporter, Mukul travelled to Mumbai and put his Hindi skills to use while living in Dharavi, Asia's largest slum, which is now slated for demolition.

For his latest Crossing Continents Mukul has been to Malaysia to look at the struggle for racial equality.