This year’s Prem Bhatia Award for excellence in political and environment journalism have been awarded to freelance journalists Parth M N and Jeff Joseph Paul.
Parth MN was awarded the Prem Bhatia Award for Excellence in Political Journalism 2025 for his reporting on violence against minorities, including Muslims, Christians and tribal people.
Joseph Paul Kadicheeni won Prem Bhatia Award for Excellence in Environmental Journalism 2025, for his “sustained and impactful contribution to environmental journalism that demonstrated depth, scientific rigor, and public impact.” He wrote on cardamom cultivation in Kerala and how the country is failing to regulate pesticide overuse and contamination in its spice trade.
The awards were given away at a function organized by Editors Guild of India, which hosted the Prem Bhatia Journalism Awards and Memorial Lecture 2025 on 11 August at IIC, New Delhi.
The jury also made a special mention of The Quint’s Fatima Khan for her video reports on communal incidents.
The Prem Bhatia lecture was delivered by former chief justice of the Supreme Court of India, Sanjiv Khanna, on ‘Judiciary and Media, Shared Principles: Similarities and Dissimilarities.’
“Seventy-five years after India’s independence the question isn’t whether we have the freedom of thought and expression. The question is whether freedom has grown more inclusive and more resilient. Has it widened its arc to accommodate new voices, deeper dissent, involving discourse. Has it responded meaningfully to the demand of the present day?” justice Khanna said.
The awards and the lecture were instituted in 1955 by the Prem Bhatia Memorial Trust in memory of the editor of The Tribune. Last year, the trust handed over its corpus to the Editors Guild of India.
