Reeta Chakrabarti was born on 12 December 1964 in Ealing, London to an Indian Bengali family and was raised in Birmingham.
"[3] Chakrabarti started as a producer on BBC Radio 4, working on the Today programme, The World at One and PM before becoming a reporter on 5 Live Breakfast, in which she covered the French presidential elections, and the Dunblane massacre.
During this time Chakrabarti covered three UK general elections, several changes of party leaders, with other notable stories including the Cash for Honours affair and MPs' expenses.
In 2010 she became an education correspondent and covered changes to university tuition fees, the introduction of free schools, growth in academies and changes to exams and the curriculum.
During 2017 and 2018, she reported three times on the Rohingya crisis from Bangladesh and Myanmar, and anchored the BBC's coverage of the 70th anniversary of the partition of India and Pakistan in 2017.
[citation needed] In December 2022 Chakrabarti was a member of the team for Exeter College, Oxford, which reached the semi-final in BBC Two's Christmas University Challenge.
Her younger sister, Lolita Chakrabarti is a British actress and writer and her brother-in-law Adrian Lester is an actor.
[8][9] She is a fan of the poet John Keats, and chose him as her specialist subject on the BBC television quiz Celebrity Mastermind broadcast on 22 December 2016.