New Delhi: This year's recipients of the Prem Bhatia Journalism Awards are Akanksha Kumar (excellence in political journalism), who is currently with The Wire, as well as Pankaj Sekhsaria and Rohini Krishnamurthy (excellence in environmental journalism).

Kumar won the Award for Excellence in Political Journalism for her reportage on police encounters in Uttar Pradesh, the invocation of the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act after the Nuh violence and systematic violence during Christian prayer meetings in Rajasthan laying the foundations for the state's anti-conversion law. She had produced these reports during her time with Newslaundry.

Speaking at the awards function hosted by the Editors' Guild of India (EGI) in Delhi on Monday (August 11), Kumar echoed journalist Sreenivasan Jain on what it is like to report the news in India today: “These are extraordinary times. If you are a journalist, then you are actually watching your country slide into a majoritarian autocracy.”

Sekhsaria was given one of two Awards for Excellence in Environmental Journalism for his reportage on the contentious Great Nicobar mega project and its likely impact on the island's pristine rainforests and its indigenous Shompen tribal people.

“This recognition, more than anything else for me, is a reaffirmation that we today as a collective understand and appreciate the importance, the fragility and the uniqueness of a place like Great Nicobar and many other places of this country that are fragile, important in their own unique ways,” said Sekhsaria.

“It is a reaffirmation that we have not forgotten, and we will not forget,” he added.

Krishnamurthy received her Award for Excellence in Environmental Journalism for her investigative work on a wide variety of issues.

Her citation mentions her reportage on “mushrooming data centres, the exploitation of agro-forestry farmers in the carbon credit market, and off-shore sand mining impacting marine life and local livelihoods”. She also painted “positive portraits of gamechanger solutions such as large scale organic farming in Chhattisgarh's Dantewada district, earlier known only as a Maoist stronghold, and … the huge potential in energy-saving technologies”.

“I'm aware of the responsibility that this award brings, and I should continue doing good work. I cannot take my job for granted, and I should continue holding governments and businesses accountable,” Krishnamurthy said on Monday.

EGI president Sanjay Kapoor in his remarks touched on the state of the media in today's India, speaking about its “failing credibility” that was spotlighted during the recent Cockroach Janta Party-led youth protests, where agitators had routinely lambasted the ‘godi media’.

Independent Rajya Sabha MP and lawyer Kapil Sibal delivered the Prem Bhatia Memorial Lecture, emphasising the importance of the media and the judiciary in sustaining a democracy.

If the press once spoke truth to power and helped shape public opinion for the better, today it has “been reduced to a managed narrative”, Sibal said – “sometimes through intimidation, sometimes through co-option, and often through the quiet calculus of survival”.

“When large sections of television news function less as platforms for independent scrutiny and more as amplifiers of official narratives, the public ceases to see them as watchdogs and begins to see them as part of the power structure they are meant to hold to account,” he said. Read the full text of his address here.

The awards' namesake Prem Bhatia was once editor-in-chief of The Tribune newspaper and they were instituted in his memory in 1995, the year he passed away.

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