Times of India journalist Chaitanya Marpakwar has won the Ramnath Goenka Foundation’s (RNG) Prakash Kardaley Memorial Award for civic journalism for his extensive reportage on the citizen-led Save Aarey movement, an initiative against the hacking of 3,000 trees to build a Metro shed in Mumbai’s Aarey forest in the Mumbai Mirror.
The award, instituted in the memory of The Indian Express’s former Resident Editor in Pune, Prakash Kardaley, honours a print journalist whose sustained effort highlights a civic issue and forces authorities to find a solution for it.
Marpakwar’s report, ‘Cutting Aarey trees can lead to floods at airport in heavy rain’ reveals how the government overlooked an environmental assessment report that had warned that converting forest land at Aarey could lead to floods at the Mumbai International Airport in the event of heavy rains.
