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Shyamlal Yadav and Jay Mazoomdaar of The Indian Express have won the Asian College of Journalism (ACJ) Award for Investigative Journalism for 2016. They got the award for their series of stories on One-rupee Jan Dhan trick, published in The Indian Express in September 2016.
A three-member jury chaired by Justice AP Shah, a former Chief Justice of the Madras and Delhi High Courts, and including Jayati Ghosh, economist and columnist, and Krishna Prasad, former Editor-in-Chief of Outlook, selected the winners from 84 entries.
Justice Shah presented the award to the two journalists at a function in Chennai. The award comprises a trophy, citation and a purse of ₹2 lakh.
The citation by the jury on the winning entry reads: “The One-Rupee Trick’, by Shyamlal Yadav and Jay Mazoomdaar of The Indian Express , revealing the abuse by bank officials of the zero-balance accounts of India’s unbanked, is the winner of the second ACJ Award for Investigative Journalism.
“Yadav and Mazoomdaar drew the nation’s attention to how public servants have fallen prey to perception management in a media-saturated era, by spending out of their own pocket to dress up data.”
“By using the Right to Information Act to ferret out the details, the two reporters have demonstrated that the deft use of the landmark legislation can result in a wealth of riveting stories outside the straight, narrow and predictable,” it adds.
The jury made a special mention of four other entries: Nikhil M Babu in India Spend : ‘Unspent Money for Dalits/Tribals, $42.6 billion = 8 Times Agri Budget’; Raghu Karnad and Grace Jajo in Akshar Magazine : ‘Confessions of a Killer Policeman’; Kumar Sambhav Shrivastava in Hindustan Times : ‘The Jungle Gangs of Jharkhand’; and Utkarsh Anand in The Indian Express : ‘The Great Government Bank Write-off.
The ACJ Award for Investigative Journalism was instituted last year. The first recipient of award was Nilita Vachani for her story ‘Inside Job - The Woman who was Sacrificed to Nab Raj Rajaratnam’ published in Caravan in November 2015.
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