The Indian Express Special Correspondent Sonu Jain, whose coverage of environment and agriculture in this newspaper—from illegal mining to CNG, Bt Cotton to melting glaciers—touched off judicial intervention and policy debates, has been awarded The Media Foundation’s 2003-04 Chameli Devi Jain Award for an Outstanding Woman Mediaperson. Jain shares the award with Chitrakoot Rural Women’s Collective that publishes Khabar Lahariya, a rural journal, said an announcement today by foundation chairman B G Verghese. The award will be presented by former Prime Minister I K Gujral on March 29 at a function in the capital. This will be followed by a lecture by senior Al Jazeera Editor Jamil Azar from Doha, Qatar, on ‘‘Al Jazeera: A New Arab Voice in West Asia.’’ In her seventh year with The Indian Express, Jain, 31, joined as a correspondent with its Gujarat edition where she covered the Kutch cyclone and the Jan 26, 2000 earthquake. She moved to New Delhi as Chief Reporter in 2001 and is now Special Correspondent. Jain exposed the nexus between politicians and mine-owners in the Aravalli belt and showed how this had severely depleted the groundwater table. The Supreme Court last week reaffirmed its ban on illegal mining. Her series on the introduction of CNG in New Delhi was referred to by the Supreme Court in the ongoing air pollution case. Her four-part report on the decay of the Red Fort formed the basis of a PIL that resulted in the Army vacating the fort last year. Jain, who covered the Johannesburg summit in 2002, was the first to report on how the Government was sitting on the positive results of the field trials for transgenic Bt Cotton. More recently, she tracked down the wife of Pradeep, the rickshaw-puller who saw Satyendra Dubey being murdered and who is now missing after being questioned by the CBI. The award jury included Kamini Mahadevan, editor of Pearson-Pengun Educational Books, Jansatta Editor Om Thanvi and columnist and author Inder Malhotra.
