Press Note – for immediate release 03 May 2024
ACJ Awards for Journalism Announced by Jury
Chennai: The Asian College of Journalism’s Awards for Journalism were announced by a three-member jury at a ceremony on the ACJ Campus today.
The winning entry for the ACJ Investigative Journalism Award belonged to The Reporters’ Collective for a 3-part series titled ‘Forests for Profits’ by Tapasya and Nitin Sethi. The winner in the K P Narayana Kumar Memorial Award for Social Impact Journalism was Akhilesh Pandey for his story titled ‘Dangerous Waters’ published in The Caravan magazine. And the Ashish Yechury Memorial Award for Photojournalism was won by Sudip Maiti for a series of images titled ‘The hungry river in West Bengal eats up homes overnight’ published in Frontline magazine.
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 winner of the investigative journalism award received a trophy, a citation by the jury and INR two lakhs [2,00,000] in prize money. The winners of the social impact award and the photojournalism awards received trophies, citations and INR one lakh [1,00,000] in prize money.
The jury also conferred the following Special Mentions in their respective categories:
Special Mentions
Investigative Journalism
1. Driving Muslims out of "Devbhoomi" by Tusha Mittal and Alishan Jafri published in The Caravan.
2. ‘Cough syrup killed scores of children. Why no one has been held to account’ by Krishna N Das and Jennifer Rigby published in Reuters.
Social Impact Journalism
1. ‘Punjab youth are unemployable. The state doesn’t have a Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune or Noida’ by Sonal Matharu published in The Print.
2. ‘Inside the hellfires of India’s brick industry’ by Shreya Raman published in Scroll.in.
3. ‘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 in Queerbeat.org.
Photojournalism – no special mentions.
The ACJ Awards Committee received 275 entries from 101 news organisations and freelance journalists in 4 languages. The ACJ Awards for Journalism, now in their 8th year, are presented each year by the Media Development Foundation and Asian College of Journalism to the best works of journalism from India.
The jury’s citations for each award is below, as are the backgrounds of the jury members.
Citations for the ACJ Awards
Each of the six entries for the Ashish Yechury Memorial Award for Photojournalism shortlisted for the jury to consider was eye-opening in different ways. They also reflected heartwarming concern for fellow citizens, their suffering as well as their resilience.
Awards Jury Bios
ACJ Investigative Journalism Award
Forests for Profit is a role model of investigative reportage. The three-part series meticulously shows how accessing documents from parliament and government ministerial communications can be the foundation for groundbreaking 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 series goes further by documenting how the new laws exempted private corporations from existing conservation laws. This paved the way for real estate and plantation companies to operate more freely, overriding environmental concerns and tribal community rights. Forests for Profit is a close up of the government machinery in action when it wishes to dilute environmental standards. This is a live issue across the country that cuts across party lines and states: It is not a pretty sight.
This series also helps underline the validity of the parliamentary Committee on Government Assurances’ oversight powers. This is a much needed example of one pillar of democracy creating stronger scaffolding for another. The Reporters Collective accounted for four of the 12 shortlisted entries for this award, a remarkable achievement. The Reporters Collective team of Tapasya T and Nitin Sethi richly deserve The ACJ Investigative Journalism Award for this master class in holding the government to account.
K P Narayana Kumar Memorial Award for Social Impact Journalism
The Social Impact Journalism category had many excellent entries. We chose Dangerous Waters, by Akhilesh Pandey (and with photographs by CK Vijayakumar), published in The Caravan, as our winner.
Dangerous Waters explores the problem of groundwater arsenic poisoning in the Ballia district of eastern Uttar Pradesh. We were struck not only by the depth and rigour of the reportage, but the doggedness with which Pandey stayed with the story (he traveled in Ballia for four years), and the empathy with which it is written. What emerges from Dangerous Waters is a narrative of structural, administrative, and governance failures, and the human impact of those failures. And in the best traditions of social impact journalism, while the report is focused on a specific village (something that allows Pandey to weave in the poignancy of individual stories), its findings have implications both for the issue of arsenic poisoning across a much larger geographical area, as well as for how State agencies do - or do not - deal with public health crises.
Ashish Yechury Memorial Award for Photojournalism
In the end it was Sudip Maiti’s outstanding photo essay in Frontline magazine, headlined “The hungry river in West Bengal eats up homes overnight,” that was selected for the award this year.
The feature uses 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. Maiti’s striking black and white photographs of the stark landscape, of the wreckage of what once were homes, of affected people left to fend for themselves – mainly women, children and senior citizens, and of ineffective interventions by officialdom effectively convey both the desperation of the situation and the way life still, somehow goes on.
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.
Rahul Jacob
Rahul Jacob is a former Hong Kong bureau chief and South China correspondent for the Financial Times. He started his career as reporter for Fortune magazine in the US and is an op ed columnist for Mint. He was the travel, food and drink editor of the FT Weekend in London and is author of a book of travel essays called Right of Passage.
Ammu Joseph
Ammu Joseph is an independent journalist and author based in Bangalore. Among her publications are six books: two on gender & media (Whose News? The Media and Women's Issues and Making News: Women in Journalism), three on gender & literature, and one on gender & “terror”. She has contributed to many other books and other publications, both Indian and international. She has served on the visiting faculty of several institutions of media education (including the ACJ) and is a founder-member of the Network of Women in Media, India. She has degrees in English Literature from Madras University and Public Communications from Syracuse University, as well as a PG diploma in Social Communications Media from the Maharashtra Board of Technical Education. She began her career with Eve's Weekly, in Mumbai in 1977. In her last full-time journalism job, she was editor of the Sunday magazine of The Indian Post, Mumbai.
Gautam Bhatia
Gautam Bhatia is a constitutional lawyer, legal scholar, and science fiction writer, based in Delhi. He is the author of the constitutional law books The Transformative Constitution and Unsealed Covers, and of the science fiction duology The Wall and The Horizon. Bhatia has four law degrees – one from the National Law School of India University, Bangalore, two from Balliol College at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and one from Yale University. He often spends his days with constitutional law and his nights writing science fiction, and sometimes he feels that it’s becoming hard to tell the difference between the two. He is presently in the process of finishing his third novel - science fiction inspired by the death penalty - that might finally bridge the gap between the two worlds!