New Indian Express journalist recognised for story that helped leprosy patient to get Aadhaar number

BENGALURU: The jury for the Chameli Devi Jain Award for Outstanding Woman Journalist has commended Suraksha P, senior reporter of The New Indian Express, with an Honourable Mention for her Aadhaar-related series on leprosy patients who had no access to social benefit schemes. The award will be presented in New Delhi on March 9.

In a series of four stories starting December 2, The New Indian Express highlighted the plight of leprosy patients in Magadi Road’s Leprosy Hospital. They had received letters from the tahsildar’s office to link their pension to their Aadhaar numbers, failing which they would stop receiving the benefit. These patients had either completely or partially lost their eyes and fingers.

Among them, 65-year-old Sajida Begum became the face of 86,000 lepers in India when this newspaper reported that she had not received her pension for four months for failing to link her pension to her Aadhaar number. The story, “No fingers or iris for Aadhaar, Bengaluru woman loses pension”, went viral with the story on TNIE website alone seeing 3,800 shares on Facebook.

Many news websites picked up the story with the news being extensively shared on Twitter and Facebook. Various national and international media houses - including the British Broadcasting Corporation and Daily Mail UK - and news channels picked up the story.

After the national outrage, the Unique Identification Development Authority of India (UIDAI) leapt into action to exempt Sajida and six other leprosy patients from biometric identification and provided them with Aadhaar numbers.

Out of the blue, Sajida received her pension for October and the Karnataka treasury department clarified that it is following the Centre’s extended March 31 deadline for linking social beneficiary schemes with Aadhaar.