ACJ announces list of winners for journalism awards

Chennai: Tapasya T and Nitin Sethi of The Reporters Collective have won the Award for Investigative Journalism instituted by the Asian College of Journalism for their three-part series titled Forests for Profits exposing how the Union Government backtracked from stated objectives through parliament documents and ministerial communications.

Akhilesh Pandey won the K P Narayana Kumar Memorial Award for Social Impact Journalism for his story titled Dangerous Waters published in The Caravan magazine, while Sudip Maiti of Frontlinemagazine clinched the Ashish Yechury Memorial Award for Photojournalism for a series of images titled The hungry river in West Bengal eats up homes overnight.

The awards jury was chaired by editor and columnist Rahul Jacob, who was accompanied by independent journalist and author Ammu Joseph, and constitutional lawyer and author Gautam Bhatia. The awards were presented to the winners at an event held at the ACJ campus on Friday.

While the winner of the investigative journalism award received a trophy, a citation by the jury and Rs two lakhs, the winners of the social impact award and the photojournalism awards received trophies, citations and Rs one lakh.

The jury also conferred Driving Muslims out of "Devbhoomi" by Tusha Mittal and Alishan Jafri published in The Caravan and Cough syrup killed scores of children. Why no one has been held to account by Krishna N Das and Jennifer Rigby published in Reuters as Special Mentions in Investigative Journalism.

Punjab youth are unemployable, The state doesn’t have a Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune or Noida by Sonal Matharu (The Print), Inside the hellfires of India’s brick industry by Shreya Raman (Scroll.in), and Long Shadows in the Sunset: With limited support structures, India’s LGBTQIA+ community has to work harder to plan for ageing and infirmity by Vijayta Lalwani (Queerbeat.org) were conferred Special Mentions in Social Impact Awards category.

The ACJ Awards Committee received 275 entries from 101 news organisations and freelance journalists in 4 languages.

The jury said Forests for Profit is a role model of investigative reportage as the three-part series meticulously shows how accessing documents from parliament and government ministerial communications can be the foundation for ground breaking journalism.

“The articles provide evidence of the government backtracking from stated objectives, in this case to legislate a new forests act and then in 2019 and 2021 requesting a parliamentary committee to, in effect, overlook its earlier assurances to have a new act in place,” the jury said in its citation.

Dangerous Waters explores the problem of groundwater arsenic poisoning in the Ballia district of eastern Uttar Pradesh, the jury said, adding that they were struck not only by the depth and rigour of the reportage, but the doggedness with which Pandey stayed with the story and the empathy with which it is written.

On Maiti’s photograph, the jury said the feature used images and text to tell the story of the devastating impact of the long-standing problem of river erosion on residents of villages located on the banks of the Ganga in the Malda and Murshidabad districts of West Bengal.

“The vivid photographs are accompanied by text that not only provides background information about the state of affairs but also highlights the frequently harmful side-effects of development projects that are undertaken with little regard for their impact on human beings and the ecosystem in which they are located,” it added.