The top honours in the print category, announced on Friday, went to `Deadly crop: Difficult times drive India's cotton farmers to desperate actions.'The story, written by Jonathan Karp and published in the Wall Street Journal, was about the real costs of modernisation plans having gone wrong in Andhra Pradesh.

Washington Post's Kenneth Cooper's `Taliban roots in India' on an Islamic seminary in Deoband that influenced the theology of Taliban bagged the second prize.

A story by Manjeet Kripalani in Business Week -- `Whiz kids: Inside the IITs' -- on how the IITs have become breeding grounds for financial and computer institutions in the United States received the third prize.

A committee of journalists in New York decides the awards. This year285 entries were received from 77 media organisations including CNN, the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. The awards, which comprise a certificate and cash only for the top story in a category, were presented by Daljit Dhaliwal, news anchor of ITN World News.

`Ground zero', an in-depth look at the return of nuclear weapons to the world stage, produced by CNN bagged the first prize and an investigative report on hacking of the Bhabha Nuclear Research Centre computer on the Forbes website by Adam Penenberg came second.

`Bhutan: Paradise opens the doors', a television look on the Himalayan kingdom by Hilary Brown of ABC television network, bagged the third prize.Top honours for outstanding special project on the South Asian tests went to Newsweek magazine for the report `Bomb is back: Lessons of new nuclear age.'Time magazine's `Living with the bomb: India and Pakistan in the nuclear age' was placed second and `Nuclear package' by The Wall Street Journal came third.

Twostories in the Nation -- `The gift of time: The case for abolishing nuclear weapons by Jonathan Schell' and `The end of imagination' by Arundhati Roy -- got certificates of recognition in the category.A column about poverty in India -- `Glimmer of hope for India's poor' -- by Steve Chapman in the Chicago Tribune won the top award in the outstanding editorial/oped category.

The second prize went to `India's nuclear escalation' by Farah Sahra of the Christian Science Monitor and the third to `India saves tigers' by Bonnie Erbe of Scripps-Howard News Service.

A series of articles on the ongoing investigation of the 1995 bombing of Air India's plane, written by Kim Bolan in the Vancouver Sun, was adjudged outstanding story on South Asians in North America in the print media.New York Times' report on relations between recent immigrants from South Asia and Indo Caribbeans in the wake of an attack on a New Yorker entitled `United ethnically and by an assault' by Somini Sengputa and Vivian S Toy won the secondplace.

Sudarsan Raghavan of the Philadelphia Inquirer was adjudged outstanding South Asian journalist for his report on Hurricane Mitch and Anita Srikameswaran won the second place for her report on a paediatric intensive care unit.

A photograph of Buddha taken from a bullet hole in a temple window in Colombo by Taras Kovaliv of Time won the first prize. A shot of a small girl in a camp in Pakistan's Muzzafarabad by Carolyn Cole of the Los Angeles Times came second.