Sukanya Shantha, senior assistant editor at The Wire, has won the Fetisov Journalism Award for contribution to civil rights for her series of articles on caste in Indian prisons.
The series was titled as “Barred- The Prisons Project.” The series include three stories by Shantha published in The Wire.
The Fetisov Journalism Awards promote universal human values such as honesty, justice, courage and nobility through the example of outstanding journalists from all over the world.
Last year, Shantha had also won the Asian College of Journalism’s 2020 K P Narayana Kumar Memorial Award for Social Impact Journalism for her in-depth article on caste in prisons, “From segregation to labour, Manu’s caste law governs the Indian prison system.”
Soon after the publication of Shantha’s one of the reports in December 2020, the Rajasthan High Court had taken suo motu cognisance of the matter and asked the government to revise its prison manual and remove clauses that assign work within prisons on the basis of caste. The state government changed the manual – after 70 years of prescribing a caste-based division of labour.
Shantha is a Mumbai based journalist who has written for several publications like The Wire, Indian Express, Scroll.in, The Caravan, among others.
She has won the Society of Publishers in Asia award, 2021 for human rights reporting, Golpitha Award, 2018 for reporting caste and human rights in India.
She was also awarded the Chevening South Asia Journalism Fellowship, 2021 and Pulitzer Centre grand for crisis reporting, 2020.
She has visited and stayed in several India prisons as a part of her research work with Amnesty International India. She has a master’s degree in law.
