The first issue of the paper was published in May 2002 from the town of Karwi in Chitrakoot district of Uttar Pradesh, in the local Bundeli dialect of Hindi.
In 2012, the newspaper launched editions from Mahoba, Lucknow and Varanasi districts of Uttar Pradesh in Bundeli, Awadhi and Bhojpuri dialects respectively.
[4] As of September 2012, its total print-run, all editions included, was around 6000 copies sold in about 600 villages in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar[6] with an estimated readership of 20,000.
[10] The women journalists collective now runs a digital media agency covering stories from rural India, mostly from the state of Uttar Pradesh.
[12] Owing to the support of the readers' community, Khabar Lahariya grew from a local newspaper in 2002 to publishing their own website in 2013, and launching their own subscription model, Sound, Fury and 4G in 2019.[1].
Examples are reports on violence against women, discrimination against Dalits, deaths in illegal mining operations, and the rise of Hindu nationalism.
[18][19] The publication also won a Courage Award from the International Women's Media Foundation in June for how it "disrupts and interrogates the status quo, where newsmakers have long been male, upper-caste, and politically connected".