3 min readNew DelhiApr 6, 2026 05:00 AM IST
The Indian Express reporters Aiswarya Raj and Dheeraj Mishra have won the prestigious Danish Siddiqui Journalism Award for print journalism for their two-part investigative series on how Uttarakhand’s push for adventure and aviation tourism had been quietly captured by a politically connected corporate network.
The reports, published in September 2025, traced how Acharya Balkrishna, the co-founder of Patanjali and a close aide of yoga guru Baba Ramdev, consolidated control over a tourism company. Justice Madan B Lokur, former judge of the Supreme Court, was the chief guest at the awards ceremony in New Delhi on Sunday. A special video address by Dr Raghuram Rajan, the former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, was played at the event.
The awards have been instituted by the Danish Siddiqui Foundation in memory of Danish Siddiqui, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist who headed the Reuters multimedia team in India. Siddiqui was captured and shot dead by the Taliban on July 16, 2021, while he was documenting the Afghan Special Forces mission to retake the town of Spin Boldak near Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan.
In his address, Justice Lokur emphasised the vital role of the press as the fourth pillar of democracy, noting that its primary duty is to provide citizens with accurate information. “During the Constituent Assembly debates, some members suggested including freedom of the press as a separate fundamental freedom. I would imagine this suggestion was made considering the history of the British Raj banning the press by a variety of laws,” he said.
“During the Emergency of 1975-1977, many publications were subjected to pressure and restrictions on the freedom of the press. The Indian Express was a victim of this censorship and on many occasions, the paper was printed with blank pages,” he said.
Dr Rajan said the awards are “a reminder to bear witness and to expose the injustices that run through our world”. “Unfortunately the world has become more dangerous since Danish’s passing”, he said, with “the two big economies…acting in short-sighted, self-interested ways”.
The United States, Rajan said, “is dismantling the world order and China is using the manufacturing-intensive export-led economic growth model that no longer works for the world”.
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Other winners of the awards include Abhinav Goel (Broadcast) from BBC News, Zishaan A Latif (Photojournalism) from The Washington Post, Apoorva Mandhani (Digital-Print) from The Print, Aparna Ganesan (Digital-Broadcast) from the Migration Story, Avadhesh Akodia (Jury Special Mention) from Dainik Bhaskar, and Sukanya Shantha (Special Mention) from The Wire.
