Rohit Khanna
Political Reporting (Broadcast)
CNN-IBN
For someone who directed successful television serials such as Bhanwar and Jassi Jaisi Koi Nahin (Khanna directed the first 400 episodes), taking on the role of an investigative journalist might seem a bit improbable but that’s exactly what Rohit Khanna did.
And when Mehboob Ali, a cabinet minister in the Mulayam Singh Yadav government in UP, agreed to carry drugs in his official car from Lucknow to Delhi, Rohit Khanna, executive producer, Special Investigation Team, CNN-IBN, who was leading the sting operation, knew he had a story on hand. When Ali said he would tell them where to get the drugs from, it was a deal. “The moment he said that in front of the hidden camera, we knew that the risk we took had paid off,” says the 38-year-old. Khanna and his team had collaborated with a group of independent investigative journalists for a sting operation in the heart of UP against three MLAs from the then ruling Samajwadi Party.
Over a period of six months the teams investigated the background of the three MLAs and tried making inroads into their coterie. They succeeded. “In journalism, sting operations are often looked down upon as sensational, but if you can blend in the fact in a sensible format, then that’s where the success of the story lies,” says Khanna.
—Paromita Chakrabarti

Zaffar Iqbal
Regional Reporting, Jammu and Kashmir (Broadcast) NDTV
Zaffar Iqbal was just two years into his job in the Valley when a terror attack on his newspaper office left the 32-year-old with three bullet injuries. “It took me a long time to live down the nightmare,” he says. But when he joined work after four months, this time at NDTV, Iqbal was determined to look at the brighter side of life in the Valley.
Iqbal came across a group of Kashmiri youth who dreamt of being models and he captured their stories. “For anybody who hasn’t experienced life in the Valley, it’s difficult to understand how even such a simple thing as modelling can be such a big deal. Talking to these youths, some of who were Kashmiri Pandits, was a revelation of sorts. For many of them simply waking up to a world where there was no violence in their everyday life was a culture shock. Modelling for them became far more than a career,” says Iqbal.
—Paromita Chakrabarti

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

Gautam Bhimani
Sports (Broadcast), ESPN/Star Sports
Gautam Bhimani’s niche in his words, “lies in off-beat stories which capture the different shades of cricket.” Then he talks about the beginning, in December 2003, commentating with Sunil Gavaskar at the Adelaide Oval, made all the more memorable with India’s win.
Then he tells you about the bull elephant at a game park on the South Africa-Botswana border which posed in the background for the camera in November last year. “I quietly finished the shot and jumped into the pool in front. So you see, even elephants pose for TV these days,” he says.
He recounts the time when he faced up to Wasim Akram’s bowling at the nets in Africa. ‘‘He actually hit me during the shoot,” Bhimani says. “And that, as you see, was my Journalism of Courage,” he adds.
—Siddhartha Sarma

Amelia Gentleman
Foreign Correspondent Covering India
International Herald Tribune
Amelia Gentleman’s last posting was in Paris, which is why when she came to India two years ago, Gentleman was a little wary about her new assignment. “I thought I would miss the Parisian culture and the beauty of the city, but when I came here it was very liberating. There’s a sense of energy and dynamism in India right now because of the flourishing economy,” says the foreign correspondent of the International Herald Tribune.
But months into her new job Gentleman sensed that beneath all the optimism, there was a lot that contradicted the upwardly mobile graph of India. “I was working on a series on children, particularly rural children, because I thought it would be interesting to map out the next generation of Indians through the rapid economic growth,” says the 35-year-old. As she travelled all over northern India, she stumbled upon Auraiya district in northern UP. “I discovered there was 0 percent birth registration there over the last decade because of bureaucratic red tape,” she says. “It was a worrying picture about how such a large percentage of these children lived in poverty and there was no statistical result at all of their existence,” she says. Gentleman’s series brought to the fore the plight of kids across India who were forced into labour or were prey to trafickking. “I have two young kids myself and it’s a lovely place to bring them up, but if you look at the broader picture there’s still a fair bit of work that the government needs to do to put things into perspective,” she says.
—Paromita Chakrabarti

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