We are proud to announce that The Quint was a finalist in two categories at the prestigious The Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA) 2025 Awards.
Our immersive, investigative story Patriarchy’s Silent Hand: The Hidden Pressure on Women to Become Organ Donors was a finalist in the category Excellence in Reporting on Women’s Issues (Regional/Local).
The project — by Mythreyee Ramesh and Meenakshy Sasikumar, formerly at The Quint — stemmed from a revealing statistic shared by the National Organ and Tissue Transplant Organisation: between 1995 and 2021, four out of five organ donors in India were women, and four out of five recipients were men. This sharp gender skew led us to dig deeper into how gender and patriarchy influence medical decision-making within families — especially around living organ donation.
This story was hidden in plain sight. While stories of Indian women donating organs to family members abound, similar examples involving men are far less common. We sought to explore whether this imbalance was purely coincidental or reflected deeper social expectations and pressure.
One of the biggest challenges we faced during this investigation was the absence of centralised data on living organ donors in India. To bridge this gap, our health reporters worked closely with top nephrologists across three major Indian hospitals, sitting in on hospital visits and interviewing doctors, donors, recipients, and their families.
The result was a deeply human, visual narrative — one that embedded personal video testimonies, illustrated case studies from different age, income, and geographic groups, and striking data visualisations. The immersive format allowed readers to engage with the issue at both an emotional and systemic level.
Meanwhile, Himanshi Dahiya’s story Dalit Family 'Tricked' Into Donating ₹10 Cr to BJP in Political Funding was a finalist for The Scoop Award (Regional/Local) at The SOPA 2025 Awards, which honours an exclusive story that has a significant impact and is widely followed by competing news media.
The story originated in October 2022, when Dahiya made a brief reporting stop in Anjar, a sparsely populated town in Gujarat’s Kutch district, during the state Assembly elections. At the time, she could not have anticipated that the town would soon emerge at the centre of a startling political funding controversy involving electoral bonds.
At the heart of this story is Savakara Manvar, a Dalit farmer and his family, who claim that they were duped into donating Rs 11 crore in electoral bonds — of which Rs 10 crore went to the BJP. The farmer's family was supposed to receive this money as part of compensation after their land was acquired for Special Economic Zone (SEZ) activities.
Among the accused are officials of Welspun Enterprise Ltd (a company with links to the Adani Group), Mehul Desai (then Deputy Collector of Kutch), and Hemant Rajnikanth Shah (a local BJP leader).
The reporting process came with significant hurdles — combing through hundreds of pages of land deal documents, corroborating them with claims made by the family, and navigating a language barrier.
Once published, the story garnered widespread attention and was appreciated for its depth and detail. Several digital news outlets carried the story, including Vibes of India and Satya Hindi. Others like Media One, Asianet News Tamil, Dool News, and journalist Ravish Kumar’s YouTube channel picked up the story.
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