Emergent Ventures winners, new India cohort

A further Covid-19 India Prize goes to award winning journalist Barkha Dutt for her reporting on the Covid pandemic and related crises in India.

Because of the Covid lockdown (March-June 2020), Indian news reporting and broadcasting faced severe disruptions in March-April 2020. For the first 50 days, as television networks remained studio-bound, Dutt and her small team traveled across India to report from the ground, producing over 250 ground reports. All the videos and reports are available on the MoJo youtube channel.

One of the world’s most severe lockdowns unleashed a massive internal migration from the cities to the villages in India. Dutt’s team was one of the first to shed light on the erroneous state policies concerning economic migrants in India during the lockdown,, often while walking alongside migrants. Her sustained coverage eventually led other stations and newspapers to follow and report similar stories and invoked a policy response from the government.

Another Covid-19 India Prize goes to award winning data journalist Rukmini S, for The Moving Curve Podcast, covering the data issues in India. She is currently an independent journalist writing for Mint, The Print, India Today (where she is tracking the pandemic daily) and India Spend (she is tracking Covid mortality) and writes occasionally for The Guardian, SCMP and The Hindu.

She distills all the information, data, and her daily insights into a 5-7-minute audio update in the form of a free podcast, now at 92 episodes. The episodes range from getting to the heart of India’s death statistics, interviewing a rural doctor about what it’s like waiting for Covid to hit, to attempting to cut through India’s public/ private healthcare binary, and they have had significant influence on many state governments. The Moving Curve podcast is produced by a small team of two – Rukmini S and sound engineer Anand Krishnamoorthi. The podcast is available on the major platforms as well as on medium.