BHUBANESWAR: Chairman of Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister and head of the jury for selection of the first Ramnath Goenka Sahithya Samman, Bibek Debroy on Sunday said that it took the panel half an hour to finalise the awardees.
Expressing his gratitude to The New Indian Express for choosing jury members who were remarkably cohesive, Debroy said, “I have no idea whether TNIE did it consciously or not but that essentially is what happened.” He said the Sahithya Sammman award was for three categories - fiction, non-fiction and lifetime achievement. The New Indian Express had prepared a list of writers which was not long but not short either. All the jury members read all the books. For the lifetime achievement category, there was a short list of writers.
“In our first meeting in New Delhi, we roughly zeroed in on at least three names in each category. There was a remarkable consensus among all the jury members. It was a difficult choice to arrive at one from each category. We had thought it will take long hours to arrive at a consensus in each category. Interestingly, the meeting was over in half-an-hour,” he recounted.