Chennai : Prof Aniket Aga (Associate Professor of Anthropology & Environmental Studies) and Prof Chitrangada Choudhury (Associate Professor of Practice in Environmental Studies & Public Policy) from Krea University have won the Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism in the ‘Environment, Science and Technology’ category. The Awards aim to celebrate excellence, courage and commitment, showcasing outstanding contributions every year, paying tribute to Print, Digital and Broadcast journalists who maintain the highest standards of their profession.

Prof Aga and Prof Choudhury had published two articles on illegal herbicide-tolerant GM cotton seeds and associated lethal chemical inputs like glyphosate which are sweeping through biodiversity-rich Adivasi farms of Odisha’s Eastern Ghats. Their two articles titled, ‘Sowing the seeds of climate crisis in Odisha’ and ‘Cotton has now become a headache’, along with a broader climate change series, were published by the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI).

Prof Aniket Aga’s interests span science and technology studies, democratic politics, and agrarian studies, and works on questions of environmental justice, food democracy and sustainable agriculture. His first book ‘Genetically Modified Democracy’ examining the ongoing controversy over genetically modified (GM) food crops in India is recently out from Yale University Press and will be published in South Asia in early 2022 by Orient Blackswan. He works closely with students from disadvantaged groups, including Dalit, Bahujan and Adivasi students as well as students from rural backgrounds.

Prof Chitrangada Choudhury is a multimedia journalist and researcher. Her reportage on the environment, social justice and rural, in particular indigenous communities, has been cited for multiple awards including the Sanskriti Award (2008), the Press Council of India’s National Award for Investigative Reporting (2015), and the Lorenzo Natali Journalism Prize twice (2010 & 2018). She is a Founding member of The People’s Archive of Rural India, an Editorial Board member of Article 14, and a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for World Environment History, University of Sussex.