By D V L Padma Priya
Members of the NWMI won accolades at the recently concluded Laadli Media Awards ceremony. The 9th edition of the Laadli Award was held at United Services Institute of India, New Delhi on September 14. Eighty-two media professionals from across the country working in 13 languages were honoured for their outstanding effort in highlighting gender concerns. The awards were presented by P Sainath, a renowned development journalist, founder editor of People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI) and Magsaysay Award winner along with other leaders from the media and development sectors.
It was awards galore for members of the Network of Women in Media, India (NWMI) at the recently concluded Laadli Media Awards ceremony. The 9th edition of the Laadli Award was held at United Services Institute of India, New Delhi on September 14. Eighty-two media professionals from across the country working in 13 languages were honoured for their outstanding effort in highlighting gender concerns. The awards were presented by P Sainath, a renowned development journalist, founder editor of People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI) and Magsaysay Award winner along with other leaders from the media and development sectors.
Urvashi Sarkar, freelance journalist and PARI Fellow, received Laadli Media Award 2017 for Gender Sensitivity in Feature Category. She won this for her poignant story on widows in Sundarbans titled ‘Widowed by tigers, abandoned by the state’. You can read her story here
Aheli Moitra, special reporter for The Morung Express was honoured for her outstanding effort in highlighting role of women in transforming agrarian economies in a feature story ‘How a Village in Phek District Revived Millets and Became Gender Wise’ and was awarded under Best Feature-Print.
Another NWMI member and correspondent with The News Minute Ragamalika Karthikeyan won two awards which she shared with her colleagues Nitin Bhaskaran and Theja Ram. They were recognised in Feature-Web Category (‘Tied up, stripped, forced to sit on her own excreta – Inhuman treatment meted out to inmates of a Hyderabad rehab home’) and News Report-Web ( ‘Shaming of the Mother in Pascal Child abuse case shows all that’s wrong with our legal system’ talks about the child rape case in Bengaluru in which a former French diplomat, Pascal Mazurier, was an accused). You can read more about the award winning articles here. 
Rakhee Roytalukdar, NWMI member and independent journalist from Jaipur won a Laadli award for her detailed report on a weaving project which helped ‘ruwathis’ of Assam turn their passion for weaving into livelihood. Her winning article can be read here.
Yet another member Shreya Ila Anasuya, a fiction and non-fiction writer, was awarded for Best Op-ed (Western Region) an op-ed published in The Wire. Titled ‘Why We Should Pay Urgent Attention to a Campaign to Stop the Trans Bill 2016, the article highlighted how the draft Bill the Centre circulated began with an inaccurate and dangerous definition of the word ‘transgender’. She also won a jury appreciation award for another article titled There’s Someone Else Like You: Inside Asexuality Network
Laxmi Prasanna Ajai, special correspondent at Times of India, Trivandrum was awarded the Best Investigative story/ English for her story titled No compensation for sex abuse survivors for the last over 10 years. She had won the award in 2016 too in the same category.
Another member who won an award was K.S. Sugitha for best column for in Tamil publication Arasiyal Pazhaguvam. She had also won an award in 2017 in the category of Tamil print feature for her article Pengalin Athikaramum Arasiyalum.
Photographs (from top): Urvashi Sarkar with P Sainath of PARI and AL Sharada of Population First; Aheli Moitra; Rakhee Roytalukdar with P Sainath and AL Sharada; Ragamalika Karthikeyan and Theja Ram with P Sainath and AL Sharada; and Shreya Ila Anasuya with P Sainath and AL Sharada.
September 25, 2018
