The winners of the 2023 Ramnath Goenka Awards for Excellence in Journalism on their stories that took them to different parts of India, the challenges they faced and the impact they made — from uncovering a drug scam to reporting from conflict zones
Maitri Porecha – The Hindu
Derailed and Distraught
“I’m technically a health reporter. So when I found out about the Balasore train accident, I decided to go to the hospital first. I found out that a loco pilot and an assistant loco pilot, who were reported to be dead in early flashes, were actually alive. That became my first story. Passenger bodies were so badly mutilated that they had no identifying markers anymore. It was very triggering to report. I broke down in the hospital because of all the corpses I saw. A staffer told me to contain my emotions because the relatives of those who had been injured or killed were frantically searching for hope, and they could get disturbed.”
Ashutosh Mishra – India Today TV (Broadcast)
Ashutosh Mishra – India Today TV (Broadcast)
A Fraught State
“Manipur was hardly being reported on and the existing reportage only focused on the violence. But we wanted to show the plight of people trapped in that situation. It was the worst kind of humanitarian crisis we had seen. So we decided to go to the root cause, staying in the state for 15 days. We met people from every walk of life and showed how the state was literally divided. I was surprised that people in Manipur knew about us, a largely Hindi news channel. They also knew that we showed every side of a story. That is all they wanted, for their voices to be heard.”
UNCOVERING INVISIBLE INDIA
Satyasundar Barik – The Hindu (Print)
Satyasundar Barik – The Hindu (Print)
The Courage to Speak
“My story was about workers migrating to metro cities and being sexually exploited. Some were even forced into marriage. This was a distressing story to do. I remember going to interview a 13-14 year old girl but since she had been brutally raped, she ran away from me. That’s when I decided to widen the scope of the story to probe exploitation of minor girls. I found out about thousands of minor girls who had been missing for years.”
Vishnukant Tiwari and Athar Rather – The Quint (Broadcast/Digital)
Into the Jungle
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“We stayed in different parts of Jharkhand for 15 days or so to tell the story of women who were paraded naked and killed in the interior part of the state for practising ‘witchcraft’. The challenge was to make them trust us and we spent time with them, eating with them and understanding the whole situation. Moreover, according to tribal beliefs, women are often not allowed to talk to outsiders.”
FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT COVERING INDIA
Nilesh Christopher – Rest of World (Print/Digital)
Paradigm Shifts
“The biggest issue I faced (reporting on AI and the shift in manufacturing away from China) was lack of expertise among local NGOs. I had to engage an expert from New York.”
INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING
Nihal AP Koshie, Mahender Singh Manral and Mihir Vasavda
The Indian Express (Print)
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The Women who led the Charge and took on Power
“The courage of the women wrestlers, who were protesting sexual harassment, was commendable because they were up against an influential MP, Brij Bhushan Singh, and by extension the government at the Centre. The challenge was to get the alleged victims and witnesses to first trust us, then open up and speak about their ordeal. A slander campaign had begun against the wrestlers, so one had to go over information from sources with a fine tooth comb before publishing stories. As journalists, it was important not to get swayed by emotion, fall for planted stories and stick to the facts.”
Anurag Dwary – NDTV (Broadcast)
Falling Standards
“We did ground reporting from different districts to find a medical college scam across Madhya Pradesh and took help from stringers since legwork was limited during the pandemic. We interviewed the minister who was heading the medical education department, students who suffered as well as the general public.”
BUSINESS & ECONOMIC JOURNALISM
Twesh Mishra – The Economic Times (Print)
Rocky Road to the Future
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“The story highlighted discrepancies in the disbursal of government subsidies intended for local manufacturing of electric vehicles. There was ample resistance from large to midsize corporates, which were flouting norms, including threats of legal notices. After the initial gaffe, the Union Ministry of Heavy Industries (MHI) ensured that any illegally disbursed subsidies were recovered. Norms were significantly tightened and stricter monitoring introduced.”
SPORTS JOURNALISM
Shahab Ali and Amarnath Kashyap – Hindustan (Print)
Not Just Humble Beginnings
“We wrote the story of how renowned athlete Asha Barla’s house in her village didn’t even have drinking water, her sisters weren’t able to study in school, the roads in the village were broken. Going there was challenging. The police didn’t go there, there were militants all around controlled the area and would stop us on our way. When we published the story, the district administration threatened us. The Jharkhand government applied pressure on them and eventually action was taken.”
Tejas Vaidya and Enakshi Rajvanshi – BBC Hindi (Broadcast/Digital)
Leaving the Sidelines
“We had to bring sensitivity to the reportage of sports played by women. We went to Gujarat for a general story but found out about a tribal woman with a five-month-old child, who would travel far every weekend to attend a cricket camp. In a country where cricket is an obsession, there’s no deep dive into women’s passion for cricket. There’s patriarchy in sports too. It was difficult to get in touch with anyone for the story initially because there’s no fixed federation for this sport. We spent 15 days on it. Mostly private bodies are handling this. There was no government entity we could talk to to find sources. For 15 to 20 days, we just looked for people and tried to find out where people are from. One of the coaches was also difficult to reach.”
ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Sibu Kumar Tripathi – India Today (Print/Digital)
A City that could Sink
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“Joshimath was a city going down due to its own weight. It was developed on the ruins of a really old landslide. The foundation was unstable. There had been an infrastructural and population boom and that contributed to the problem. We wrote on how the warning signs had been around since 1976 when a study was done on the issue. One of the challenges we faced was de-jargonising the information and simplifying it for a layperson.”
Joel Michael and Rohini Krishnamurthy – Down To Earth (Broadcast/Digital)
A Deadly Leak
“We wanted to look at not just the 2023 Ludhiana gas leak. That was just one crack. We wanted to find the root cause of the problem. We found people who were affected, spoke to activists who had been campaigning for better waste management and scientists who had studied the drain.”
FEATURE WRITING
Shubhajit Roy – The Indian Express
Inside the Conflict Zone
“Reporting on a war can be a challenge so when I found myself at the Israel-Gaza border, I knew this was among the toughest assignments I would face. Hamas rockets zinged past my ears, sometimes so close that I had to run for shelter to the nearest bunker mid-interview. The days would start with coaxing drivers to take me closer to the theatre of war. My experience in Afghanistan as the Taliban took over Kabul in August 2021 helped me plan for contingencies.”
PHOTOJOURNALISM
P Ravikumar – The New Indian Express
Devastation Reigns
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“In the aftermath of the Michaung cyclone, I captured a huge oil spill that devastated many homes. We had technical as well as physical difficulties during the story. My lungs got affected because of how polluted the atmosphere had gotten. I was unwell for a while. The doctor said my lungs were working at 45 per cent capacity. Think about the people who suffered, who lived there. They lost their homes and natural resources. Fishing is the main livelihood for Ennore (Chennai) residents. About 10 tonnes of oil had accidentally leaked from a factory and gotten mixed with flood water, entering the houses of many people. They were flooded up to four to five feet. Fishing was stopped for two to three months. Only after six months was the water clear enough to venture into. I am satisfied that this story got national attention. Since this was a man-made disaster, it can be averted in the future.”
HINDI
Mridulika Jha – Aaj Tak (Print/Digital)
Taking Any Way Out
“We did the Dunki route story before Shah Rukh Khan’s film. We went to a Haryana village and found just how much people stake to go to America. They didn’t want to talk to us at first but later opened up.”
Siddhant Mohan – The Lallantop (Broadcast/Digital)
The Real Kerala Story
“When I went to Kerala (to report on the simplistic narratives of the movie The Kerala Story), locals resented Delhi
media. They didn’t talk at first. I met people from radical outfits too.”
REGIONAL LANGUAGES
Jisha Elizabeth – Madhyamam (Print/Digital)
Across State Borders
“From Kerala, a lot of young people are going abroad and getting trapped. My story was about traffickers from Thailand recruiting youth to work as scammers. A challenge is that both the government and the victims themselves have no idea what is going on. They don’t have a lot of data on these scams.”
Mandar Gonjari – ABP Majha (Broadcast)
The Brains of the Operation
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“The main challenge we faced reporting on the story of an undertrial, who ran a synthetic drug racket from his hospital bed in Pune, was that so many government authorities are involved with drug cartels. Getting inside information inside was difficult. People don’t know the magnitude of (India’s) drug problem.”
BOOKS (NON-FICTION)
AR Venkatachalapathy – Penguin Random House
Standing up against the Raj
“I first read about VO Chidambaram when I was in Class X. He became the subject of my book Swadeshi Steam: VO Chidambaram Pillai and the Battle Against the British Maritime Empire. It was a David and Goliath story. In the southernmost corner of India, a small-time lawyer decided to take on the might of the British maritime empire, one of the biggest shipping empires of the world.”