The winner of 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
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 award, which comprises a trophy, a citation and INR 100,000/- in prize money, was presented to the winner by the Member, Award Jury, Gautam Bhatia, at the Convocation of the ACJ Class of 2024.
The jury’s citation read as follows:
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.
The jury also conferred the following Special Mentions for this award:
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.