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Chaitanya Marpakwar (Sourced by Express) In recent times, citizen journalism has carved out a legitimate space for itself, highlighting problems and prompting solutions. The Prakash Kardaley Memorial Award for Civic Journalism has gone to Chaitanya Marpakwar of the Mumbai Mirror 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.
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 story reveals how the government overlooked an environmental assessment report that had warned that converting the forest land at Aarey could lead to floods at the Mumbai International Airport in the event of heavy rains.
The story tracks the development from 2019 when the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) cleared the tree-felling proposal in the run-up to the Assembly elections.
Marpakwar’s investigation revealed that the 1,000-page environmental impact assessment report was given to members of the BMC’s tree authority only 48 hours before the meeting, giving them no time to study it in detail. His story also highlighted the objections raised by civic departments like the Storm Water Drains department.
“The biggest challenge while reporting was getting access to the environmental impact assessment report. It was difficult to get the facts and get them out without exaggeration or sugar-coating. There were about 1,500 pages of documents about this car shed at Aarey and they had a history of 10 years,” says Marpakwar.
Two months after the story came out, the first thing the newly-elected government in December 2019 did was stopping the construction of the car shed and moving it to another location.
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