Neerja Chowdhury wins ‘Lifetime Achievement’ Award

Mumbai, Nov 30: The Mumbai Press Club is delighted to announce the coveted National RedInk Award for ‘Lifetime Achievement’ has been bestowed on veteran journalist, columnist and author Neerja Chowdhury for her contribution of over four decades as a reporter and analyst of political affairs and government. During her long career, she has covered the terms of 8 prime ministers, reported on 10 Lok Sabha elections and has excelled in bringing unbiased news and analysis to readers.

Neerja served as Political Editor of the ‘Indian Express’ for more than a decade and continues to work even today as a regular columnist. In her recent book ‘How Prime Ministers Decide’, which has gained wide reader acclaim, she describes how different Prime Ministers of India, whom she saw at close hand, operated and took decisions.

The ‘Journalist of the Year’ Award for 2022 goes jointly to Dhaniya Rajendran, Editor and founder of ‘The News Minute’, and Independent journalist Sharad Vyas.

Dhanya led a team of journalists who did a series of investigations during the 2022 Karnataka elections that confirmed what had been suspected all along – that the election process in India is not always free and fair. The investigation uncovered a working prototype of how the electioneering process can be tampered with and then illustrated it through one constituency in Bengaluru to show how voter data was being manipulated. The media investigation finally led to an unprecedented intervention by the Election Commission, which ordered the voter lists in three constituencies to be redone.

Sharad Vyas, an independent investigative journalist in 2022, unearthed and published how the Indian Government's Intelligence Bureau (IB) imported the spy software Pegasus from an Israeli company, which had been officially denied all along. He exposed the modus operandi of the use of Dominica passports by criminal rings and Credit Suisse bank accounts by former intelligence figures to break the iron curtain around the sordid ‘Pegasus’ affair.

These awards, along with 28 other winners in 12 categories, will be presented by Swantatra Senani G.G Parikh, Chief Guest, and former Additional Solicitor General of India, Indira Jaising, in Mumbai on December 2, at the Royal Opera House.

The awards are a multi-layered contest of print/digital and video stories. First, eminent curators sift through hundreds of entries to shortlist the best ones. Thereafter, jurists with domain knowledge are set up for each category, who discuss and debate amongst themselves before deciding on the final winners.

The RedInk Awards were instituted by the Mumbai Press Club in 2011 to accord peer recognition to good investigative and feature writing and to raise the bar of journalism in the country.

The title sponsor for this year's event is Zee Entertainment Enterprises (ZEEL), and associate sponsors include Aditya Birla Group, L&T Financial Services, Indiabulls Housing, Finolex Industries, Adfactors, Concept Communication, and Pernod Ricard.