Dainik Bhaskar won the Prem Bhatia Awards for outstanding political reporting for this year, for their coverage of under-reporting of Covid deaths across the country, as per a press release shared by the daily’s journalist.

The award was given to the Dainik Bhaskar team of reporters for their coverage of the underreporting of Covid deaths in UP, MP, Rajasthan and Gujarat.

The Hindi daily had reported extensively on the government’s mishandling of covid-19, especially during the second wave. A few months later, the Income Tax department had carried out multiple raids in Dainik Bhaskar’s offices in July.

A press release issued by the Prem Bhatia Memorial Trust announced that Vaishnavi Rathore of digital magazine the Bastian also won the Prem Bhatia Award for her “wide ranging coverage of environmental degradation issues and displacement of Adivasis.”

The Prem Bhatia awards, instituted in 1995 in the memory of the journalist Prem Bhatia, is distributed annually “to propagate the values that Prem Bhatia stood for – objective reporting, fearless pursuit of the truth and a commitment to improvement in the standards of journalism in this country”.