Nilanjana Bose
Uncovering India Invisible (Broadcast)
CNN-IBN
On a story to Guntur, an AIDS afflicted belt in Andhra Pradesh, Nilanjana Bose expected to find helpless orphans. Instead, she found little heroes.
‘‘I found village after village of brave children who were like little soldiers waging their own war. They were not the helpless kids I had imagined. These were little adults who were going out, had taken over as breadwinners, were fending for their grandparents, feeding their sick younger siblings, and taking care of themselves,” says Bose.
All along, she had a burning conviction: not to reveal the identities of the positive children and people she met, while all along performing the harder task of not telling the children that they were, in fact, positive.
One image in Bose’s mind lingers: of a five year old orphan, going out to work as a ragpicker to support her ailing grandmother, an HIV positive sex worker who had lost her legs. As she says: “I am proud of my work, but also very humbled.”
—Neha Sinha

David Buhril
Regional Reporting, Northeast (Print)
The North-East Sun
The man from Churachandpur, Manipur, looks at a story in two different ways: how will his readers outside the Northeast relate to it? And how will those at the helm of affairs in the region respond to it?
Buhril went into the hills of Manipur last year, to Tipaimukh, where militant groups had unleashed a brutal campaign against ethnic groups. “We visited one village where a group of women who had been raped had taken shelter and they had been given no medical facilities.” Buhril arranged for their transport to the nearest town. Spending a week in the villages, he saw the landmines the militants had strewn the hills with. He saw first-hand the plight of refugees who had fled to neighbouring Mizoram.
“One of the aims of my stories was to get the message across to those who ought to be responsible,” he says.
—Siddhartha Sarma

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