Her journalistic career started with the Indian Express in 1981 as a City reporter based in Chennai, and later Mumbai and Delhi.
Subsequently, she served on the national news bureaus for The India Post, The Independent and The Statesman.
[3] In 2010, she won the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award for Commentary and Interpretive Writing.
"[4][5] In March 2014, she was chosen as a respondent to Jaswant Singh in a Citizen-Politician Debate on the Bharatiya Janata Party by Lila Interactions.
[6] In 2013, after Vidya Subrahmaniam wrote an op-ed in The Hindu about Sardar Patel's handling of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in 1948–49,[7] she received threatening calls and messages, causing her to file a police complaint.