Scroll’s Aarefa Johari, Arunabh Saikia, Kamayani Sharma, Rokibuz Zaman, Supriya Sharma and Tabassum Barnagarwala won five RedInk Awards for Excellence in Indian Journalism on Saturday. The ceremony was held at the Opera House in Mumbai.
Johari won the award in the women’s empowerment and gender equality category for her report about anganwadi workers’ struggles to be recognised as government employees.
Saikia and Sharma won in the politics and government category for their article on the Modi government’s weaponisation of the Enforcement Directorate against India’s Opposition. They demonstrated how the central agency has relied on recent amendments to the Prevention of Money Laundering Act to accelerate action against rights groups, activists and journalists.
Kamayani Sharma won in the arts category for a feature on the little-known history of Diwana, India’s first full-fledged Hindi humour and parody periodical addressed to adults that ran as a bilingual weekly from 1964 till 1986.
Zaman won in the human rights category for a report on how thousands of people were deprived of subsidised food as they either did not have Aadhaar numbers, or their ration cards were not linked to Aadhaar or they were left out of the National Register of Citizens.
Barnagarwala won in the health and wellness category for her story on a cholera outbreak in rural Maharashtra that occurred in April 2022, despite the Modi government’s flagship programs to improve water and sanitation.
Scroll’s Aarefa Johari, Aishwarya Iyer, Arunabh Saikia, Faustina Johnson, Ishan Kukreti, Johanna Deeksha, Nolina Sarah Minj and Umang Poddar were shortlisted for awards across categories.
Johari and Iyer were shortlisted in the human rights category for their story on the National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights’ recent shift in activities toward the pursuit of Hindutva causes and its targeting of religious minorities.
Saikia was shortlisted in the business and economy category for his investigation into the Adani Group profiting from a nexus between its mining and power generation arms, specifically from “reject” coal mined at the Parsa East and Kanta Basan mine in Chhattisgarh’s Hasdeo Arand region.
Johnson was shortlisted in the human rights category for a report on how Telangana subverted a law to prevent land grabbing in the state to acquire nearly 20,000 acres of it for the proposed Hyderabad Pharma City project.
Kukreti was shortlisted in the environment category for his report on how India’s compensatory afforestation efforts have simply not yielded results in several cases, creating “ghost plantations” across the country into which millions of rupees have been sunk.
Deeksha was shortlisted in the health and wellness category for her report on the government’s lack of support to families living with children who have Pompe’s disease, a rare genetic order in which the body is unable to break down glycogen, impairing their ability to function normally.
Minj was shortlisted in the women’s empowerment and gender equality category for her report about the precarious lives of Adivasi women taking up domestic work in Mumbai.
Poddar was shortlisted in the politics and government category for his profile of Justice Ajay Manikrao Khanwilkar, a former judge whose tenure in the Supreme Court was marked by his judgements that either expanded or upheld the state’s powers against citizens.
The National RedInk Award for Lifetime Achievement has been bestowed on veteran journalist, columnist and author Neerja Chowdhury.
The Journalist of the Year award for 2022 went jointly to Dhanya Rajendran, editor-in-chief and founder of The News Minute, and independent journalist Sharad Vyas.
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