Ground Report was founded in 2018 and incorporated as Ground Report Digital LLP on 4 June 2019 by Pallav Jain and Komal Badoekar, classmates in the 2015-16 batch at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication in Delhi. The pair built it around a single idea, that environmental reporting from rural India was being left to press releases and wire copy, and that the reporting had to be done in the districts themselves. It is recognised as a startup by India's Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade and remains independently owned, with no outside investors and no parent group. Since November 2024 its environmental reporting has been supported by the Independent and Public-Spirited Media Foundation, and it was one of ten Indian news startups selected for the Google News Initiative Startups Lab, run with Echos and the DIGIPUB News India Foundation. The newsroom is small, roughly two to ten people, and publishes in both English and Hindi alongside video reports and two podcasts. Today, Ground Report is mainly focused on climate change, agriculture and farmer protests, water and pollution, wildlife and biodiversity, rural health and school access, reported district by district across sixteen Madhya Pradesh districts and in Kashmir, from their base in Delhi, India. One interesting fact: the site publishes a free climate footage library on Flickr for other journalists to use, alongside a public climate glossary and a page of government data tools.