The 9^thedition of the ICRC-Press Institute of India (PII) Awards saw an interesting feature – all the awards on offer in the category for Best Article on a Humanitarian subject were won by independent journalists. The theme for the 2015 edition of the awards was ‘Reporting on the Fate of Victims of Natural/Man-Made Disasters’.

While Neha Dixit from New Delhi bagged the first prize, it was Kashmir-based Shazia Yousuf, who won the second prize. The third prize in the print media category was jointly awarded to Guwahati-based Priyanka Borpujari and New Delhi-based Saurabh Yadav.

In the Photography category, Biju Boro of Asomiya Pratidin and Rishabh Jain of Dainik Bhaskar jointly bagged the third prize. The first and the second prizes in this category were not awarded in this edition.

For both categories, a total of 85 entries were received, and they covered a wide variety of humanitarian issues, ranging from the floods in Kashmir to the earthquake in Nepal. They also reflected on how these impacted the lives of communities caught in their path. Some entries provided an exposé of the condition of women and children in emergency situations—issues that are often ignored by the mainstream media.

The ICRC and the PII started the annual competition in 2008, in an effort to recognize the work of Indian journalists in the field of humanitarian reporting. The focus is on people adversely affected by situations of humanitarian concern and the extraordinary resilience shown by them in such situations.