: M. Palanikumar, a Chennai-based photographer working with the People’s Archive for Rural India, has won the Ashish Yechury Memorial Award for Photojournalism this year for documenting the lives of sanitation workers’ families who are illegally forced into manual scavenging.

Receiving the award, he said that he had witnessed at least 85 deaths in the past 10 years while documenting these families.

The ACJ Award for Investigative Journalism went to Hemant Gairola, a freelance journalist, for his article “Banks Want Forged Paper Trails After Taking Money Illegally from Customers for Modi Government’s Flagship Schemes’ that was published in the website Article 14.

The K.P. Narayana Kumar Memorial Award for Social Impact Journalism went jointly to Vandana Menon for her story ‘Rajashtan’s elderly are victims of digital murder: eKYC gaps leave lakhs without pension’ and the team of Shamsheer Yousaf, Monica Jha and Sriram Vittalamurthy for their multimedia series ‘Breaking the Nets: An Oral History of India’s Fisherwomen’.

The award jury comprised veteran journalist Kalpana Sharma, independent journalist Priya M. Menon, and documentary photographer Harikrishna Katragadda.