{"id":313667,"date":"2019-06-24T05:10:28","date_gmt":"2019-06-24T05:10:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tehelka.com\/?p=313667"},"modified":"2019-06-24T16:23:07","modified_gmt":"2019-06-24T16:23:07","slug":"rachna-khaira-bags-redink-journalist-of-the-year-award-for-aadhar-expose","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rachna-khaira-bags-redink-journalist-of-the-year-award-for-aadhar-expose\/","title":{"rendered":"Rachna Khaira Bags Redink \u2018Journalist Of The Year\u2019 Award For &#8216;Aadhar&#8217; Expose"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: 'times new roman', times, serif;\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-313668 aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/tehelka.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/IMG-20190624-WA0002.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"960\" height=\"640\" srcset=\"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/media\/2019\/06\/IMG-20190624-WA0002.jpg 960w, https:\/\/tehelka.com\/media\/2019\/06\/IMG-20190624-WA0002-300x200.jpg 300w, https:\/\/tehelka.com\/media\/2019\/06\/IMG-20190624-WA0002-768x512.jpg 768w, https:\/\/tehelka.com\/media\/2019\/06\/IMG-20190624-WA0002-696x464.jpg 696w, https:\/\/tehelka.com\/media\/2019\/06\/IMG-20190624-WA0002-630x420.jpg 630w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 960px) 100vw, 960px\" \/>Rachna Khaira, who wrote for\u00a0The Tribune, has bagged the prestigious RedInk Award for \u2018Journalist of the Year\u2019 for her far-reaching expose during Calendar 2018 on the functioning of the Unique Identification Authority of Indian (UIDAI) and its Aadhar data cache. Her investigation confirmed that personal data of millions of citizens was at risk of being hacked or traded for a price. By running a series of stings with The Huffington Post, the journalist was able to raise serious doubts about the claims by government that Aadhar data stored in UIDAI servers was safe and secure.<\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: 'times new roman', times, serif;\">\u00a0<\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: 'times new roman', times, serif;\">Many of the leads provided by Ms Khaira become part of public interest litigation (PIL), which finally led to the onerous and mandatory aspects of Aadhar being watered down.<\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: 'times new roman', times, serif;\">However, instead of complimenting the journalist for having brought to light the deficiencies of the system, and the threat posed to the privacy of the citizen, the UIDAI launched police action against Rachna Khaira, her editor Harish Khare, and the newspaper\u00a0The Tribune.<\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: 'times new roman', times, serif;\">\u00a0<\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: 'times new roman', times, serif;\">Rachna Khaira currently works for The Huffington Post.<\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: 'times new roman', times, serif;\">The Mumbai Press Club, which has instituted the RedInk Awards for Excellence in Journalism, has bestowed the coveted Lifetime Achievement Award this year jointly to two retired senior journalists \u2013 Dinu Ranadive, 94, who retired from the Maharashtra Times, and Photojournalist Sebastian D\u2019Souza, who served as Photo Editor of\u00a0Mumbai Mirror.<\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: 'times new roman', times, serif;\">In selecting the names of Dinu Ranadive and Sebastian D\u2019Souza among an array of distinguished journalists, the Managing Committee has sought to recognize their decades of hard-nosed ground news coverage; and the deep impact they made in their heydays without getting the recognition they deserved.<\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: 'times new roman', times, serif;\">\u00a0<\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: 'times new roman', times, serif;\">Dinu Ranadive, who retired as the Chief Reporter of Maharashtra Times, started his career as the founder-editor of the\u00a0Samyukta Maharashtra Patrika\u00a0in the 1950s, which had a lasting impact in the movement for the unification of \u2018Maharashtra\u2019 as a state based on language. He then did exemplary work on reporting on the Goa Freedom Struggle in 1961. This was followed by frontline war reporting during the Bangladesh war in 1970-71, during which he trekked on foot to the rural areas around Chittagong. Again, in 1982, when Maharashtra went through the throes of the \u2018cement scandal\u2019, where then chief minister A.R. Antulay was named for out of turn allotments of cement to builders, Ranadive excelled with a series of breaking stories that kept the Maharashtra legislature on the boil.<\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: 'times new roman', times, serif;\">\u00a0<\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: 14pt; font-family: 'times new roman', times, serif;\">Sebastian D\u2019Souza, always a frontline news photographer, achieved acclaim for his photographs that \u2018captured\u2019 the Lashkar-e-Taiba terror attack on Mumbai on 26 November 2008. His close-ups of Ajmal Kasab, one of the terrorists who spread havoc at the Chatrapati Shivaji Train Terminus, as well as the other heart-rending scenes became viral all over the world. However, his courage and determination to get those photographs went unrewarded. Earlier, as a photojournalist of the French news agency AFP, Sebastian\u2019s coverage of the February-March 2002 Gujarat Riots in 2002 was of outstanding quality. The faces and the incidents he \u2018shot\u2019, often taking the risk of moving with rampaging rioters, brought out the horror of communal riots and the pain and suffering they caused.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Rachna Khaira, who wrote for\u00a0The Tribune, has bagged the prestigious RedInk Award for \u2018Journalist of the Year\u2019 for her far-reaching expose during Calendar 2018 on the functioning of the Unique Identification Authority of Indian (UIDAI) and its Aadhar data cache. Her investigation confirmed that personal data of millions of citizens was at risk of being [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":313668,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[36],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313667"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=313667"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313667\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":313673,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313667\/revisions\/313673"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/media\/313668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=313667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=313667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=313667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}