BENGALURU: The New Indian Express Chief Photographer Vinod Kumar T has won the ‘Mumbai Press Club RedInk Awards for Excellence in Journalism – 2018’ under the ‘Big Picture’ section.The award is for his touching picture in December 2017 of a 65-year-old leprosy-afflicted Bengaluru-based woman who was not given her Aadhaar number due to her disease. The picture accompanied one of the series of stories that The New Indian Express carried on the issue of Aadhaar not being granted to leprosy patients.
Following the series, patients at a leprosy hospital in Bengaluru were granted Aadhaar numbers.
Vinod received the award on Friday evening at a function organised by the Mumbai Press Club at NCPA’s Jamshed Baba Theatre at Nariman Point in Mumbai.Sajida has been living at the Leprosy Hospital on Magadi Road for the past 10 years.
This leprosy patient’s only sustenance was the B1,000 pension that she got every month. In August 2017, this was stopped for lack of Aadhaar.Sajida had lost her fingers and sight to the debilitating disease.
In August 2017, she received a letter from the deputy tahsildar’s office that her pension would stop in seven days if she failed to link it with her Aadhaar. But Sajida had no Aadhar, for which fingerprint and iris scan are mandatory.The story series was written by The New Indian Express Senior Reporter Suraksha P, who recently won a mention at the Chameli Devi Jain Award 2017 for the same.