Former News18.com journalist Aniruddha Ghosal on Monday won the annual Ramnath Goenka journalism award for 2018 in the civic journalism category.
He won the award for the investigation he did for News18.com that exposed the UP government’s claim of having controlled encephalitis deaths was based on data that did not quite add up.
The awards were given out by President Ram Nath Kovind at an event held in New Delhi on Monday. The Ramnath Goenka journalism award aims to celebrate excellence in journalism, recognize courage and commitment and showcase outstanding contributions and individuals every year.
Ghosal’s in-depth ground report showed that despite the Yogi Adityanath-led UP government’s claims that deaths caused by Japanese Encephalitis had dipped in Gorakhpur after the rollout of the Action Plan 2018, doctors, patients, experts and grieving families painted a different picture.
On travelling to Gorakhpur, where 71 children had died at the Baba Raghav Das (BRD) Medical College in 10 days, Ghosal found that the daily bulletin of cases for vector-borne diseases was discontinued and administrators were told explicitly to not speak of the cases or deaths.
Healthcare activists and a section of doctors alleged that numbers were being “manipulated” as it pegged the government on the back-foot. The full story can be read here.
Comments
0 comment