Scroll journalist Aarefa Johari awarded Chameli Devi Jain Award for Outstanding Woman Mediaperson 2021

Mumbai-based journalist Aarefa Johari was picked on Sunday, April 3, as the winner of the Chameli Devi Jain Award for an Outstanding Woman Mediaperson 2021.

Instituted in 1982, the annual Chameli Devi Jain Award is a prestigious recognition for women mediapersons in India who have reported on themes such as social development, politics, equity, gender justice, health, war and conflict, and consumer values.

The Media Foundation announced Johari, who works for Scroll in Mumbai, as the winner of the award, which was presented on Monday at the India International Centre in Delhi.

The winner was decided by a three-member jury, comprising Nirupama Subramanian from the Indian Express, writer Githa Hariharan and Ashutosh from SatyaHindi.

They praised Johari’s work saying it shone through with its combination of meticulous reportage, humanism and empathy, all reflecting a high order of journalistic excellence.

Harish Khare, chair of the Media Foundation, added that Johari’s ground-level reportage was an outstanding example of a journalist’s everyday privilege to help society demand fairness and justness.

Nearly 50 journalists from print, digital and broadcast media from all over India sent entries for the award, named after Chameli Devi Jain, a freedom fighter and a community reformer who went to jail during the freedom movement.

Johari has written several in-depth reports on gender and labour that have been published under Scroll.in’s Common Ground project.

She conducted an investigation into India’s worst offshore disaster that had led to the tragic death of 86 workers off the coast of Mumbai in May. She nailed down how a maze of companies, including government-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, had prioritised profits over the safety of workers, leaving hundreds in the path of Cyclone Tautkae.

Johari’s report systematically exposed the way outsourcing and contractualisation in the offshore sector had blurred the lines of accountability and compromised workers’ safety.

In several of her stories, Johari has also sensitively and insightfully examined continuing injustices at the intersection of gender and labour.

In Gujarat, she probed how patriarchy persisted even when land ownership was transferred to women farmers.

In Jharkhand, she reported on women factory workers who had defied their families to take up employment in Tamil Nadu’s textile industry, only to find themselves stranded during the coronavirus lockdown. The trauma led to many of them dropping out of the paid workforce. In March, Johari had won the 2021-22 Journalism for an Equitable Asia Merit Award for this article. The award was given by research institute Asia Centre and non-profit group Oxfam.

In Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, she looked at how the crucial work of women anganwadi workers, who are at the frontlines of India’s battle against malnutrition, was being derailed by a poorly designed technological intervention – a mobile app – that the central government had imposed on them as part of its flagship Poshan Abhiyan.

Throughout the year, Johari found newer, compelling ways to shine light on the struggles of working-class Indians.

She wrote about how the privatisation of municipal services in Mumbai had resulted in sanitation workers being absurdly declared “volunteers”. Not only were they robbed of their rightful wages, some of them were arrested and jailed because they had protested.

In a deeply insightful report, published on the fifth anniversary of Demonetisation, she had traced the differential impact of the recent economic upheavals in India on the formal and informal sectors, through the story of the diamond dust industry in Mumbai.

(With agency inputs)