Kuldip Nayar gets Ramnath Goenka Lifetime Achievement Award

Watch: Ramnath Goenka Awards 2015

At a glittering ceremony attended by leading lights from diverse fields, Information and Broadcasting minister Arun Jaitley handed over the awards to 56 journalists for their exceptional reportage in print as well as broadcast media in various categories for years 2013 and 2014.

Speaking on the occasion, Jaitley said, “A big challenge which media faces even today” is from various people involved in other businesses also tend to control news organisations, and the editorial columns start “reflecting the obvious conflict of the different interests that they have.”

Jaitley said Goenka realised that newspaper business has to be a “standalone business”. To ensure that his newspapers are insulated from external influences, Goenka established real-estate centres in various cities to support his publication, the Union minister said.

This policy helped him during Emergency, where he virtually became the sole voice in favour of democracy, Jaitley said.

“We live in an era where mediocrity sometimes dominates. To select excellence and reward it year by year, I think is a fitting tribute to him,” Jaitley said.

The newsreports which got the awards included from moving accounts of the 2012 Muzaffarnagar riot survivors, to a series of reports from Syria and Iraq on the havoc wrought by the Islamic State and from sterilisation deaths in Chhattisgarh to heart-warming accounts of young girls learning to play cricket in a Maoist-affected village in Jharkhand.

Speaking at the occasion, Viveck Goenka, chairman of the Express Group and the Ramnath Goenka Foundation said a record number of applicants this time– 700– and the quality of stories awarded showed that excellence in journalism isn’t in short supply.

Journalists, like economists, he said, have to be students of “human nature, of exuberance and fear”, especially at a time of disruptive change, Goenka added.

Among the winners, Radheshyam Bapu Jadhav of The Times of India bagged the Prakash Kardaley Memorial Award for Civic Journalism (2014) for his reports on illegal buildings in Pune and the fear of the residents, amid political apathy.

Richard Joseph of Rashtra Deepika won this award for 2013, for a story documenting life of children in tribal villages who drop out of school to support their families.