Correspondent's Note: Inequality in education struck me as the most important story in India for GlobalPost’s Special Report on income inequality, “The Great Divide,” because it results in a vicious cycle: For the most part, the poor do not have access to a good education, which forces them to fall further. At the same time, the increasing privatization of schools has made Indian education as segregated as the American South ever was — and all signs point to it getting worse. India's school system has already been privatized. And only those who can pay hefty fees get an education.

That struck me as an existential crisis for India, because Indian society is already unequal in so many ways. India’s poorest people don't have access to basic needs like food and clean water, and huge numbers die from starvation, malnutrition, and treatable diseases. The Muslim minority ranks shockingly low by almost any measure of prosperity, thanks to historical discrimination. And while some members of the lowest castes have benefited from quotas in jobs and education, most have not.

NEW YORK — Last year at this time, I was leading a moment of silence at the annual Overseas Press Club Foundation luncheon for what was the most deadly year on record for journalists since records have been being kept by the International Press Institute. We were remembering colleagues like the late New York Times correspondent Anthony Shadid, who died on assignment in Syria, and Marie Colvin, who wrote for the Sunday Times of London and was killed in a rocket attack on the compound where she was staying.

This year, at today's luncheon, we are proud to be using the ocassion to announce a $10,000 Middle East reporting fellowship for a top, young journalist who reports in the spirit of these great colleagues. We are calling it the "GroundTruth Fellowship," and the work by the selected reporting fellow will appear here in the GroundTruth blog and as a GlobalPost Special Report.

In January, Sim Chi Yin and her camera crossed 6,000 miles and 16 time zones to document the lives of migrant workers in Beijing and Los Angeles. The two cities share a Gini coefficient of about 0.48, and she set out to learn what income inequality looked like in both places.