News18.com's Adrija Bose Bags Prestigious RedInk Award in Environment Category for Story on Meghalaya Miners

News18.com’s Adrija Bose has won the prestigious RedInk award in the Environment – Print Category for her coverage of the condition of coal miners in Meghalaya.

The Mumbai Press Club recently announced winners of the National RedInk Awards for Excellence in Journalism 2019. The awards, which completed nine years this time, are given to motivate journalists towards quality writing merged with high ethical standards.

Bose’s story was about trapped labourers of illegal mines that continue to operate despite a ban by the National Green Tribunal in 2014.

While most of the coal-mine owners and dealers who handle the day-to-day work are locals, the labourers who risk their lives and enter the rat holes are usually outsiders — from Nepal, Bangladesh, Assam and the outskirts of the state.

Many of these mine workers are Bengali Muslims, often subjected to humiliation as the general idea is that they are 'Bangladeshis'. Often, children as young as 8-9 years old are engaged in too because it gets easier for a physically smaller person to enter the 'rat holes'.

Read the full story here.

News18.com’s Rounak Kumar Gunjan's immersive on ‘how masala packets help win elections by mining data of villagers with no Internet’ and Debayan Roy's story on hunger deaths in Jharkhand were nominated in the business and economy and human rights categories, respectively.

Gunjan’s story exposed for the first time how data has trickled down to remote, rural parts of Odisha and is being used to influence voters who, in most cases, have no access to internet or smart-phones. The report brought to light how personal data of unsuspecting villagers is being obtained by luring them through discounted and sometimes free packets of spices which is then being used to accordingly frame electoral campaigns.

The private company behind the scheme of things works for candidates across political parties and was hired by nine such aspirants in the state till the time News18 published the story.

Here's the full story.

Meanwhile, Roy travelled across seven districts of Jharkhand in June 2018 to find that not only were people dying of hunger but there were thousands who were excluded from the ration list owing to the tag of being "Bangladeshis".

The report found that the PDS collapse in the state was so rampant that hundreds of villages had families starving. The story is not only about villages but also how there exists "urban starvation" as well.

Here's the full story.