Scroll’s Vaishnavi Rathore wins first prize for best article at PII-ICRC Annual Awards 2023

Scroll’s Vaishnavi Rathore on Friday won the first prize in the best article category at the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Press Institute of India Annual Awards 2023 for her story on migration driven by climate change.

The theme for the awards this year was “Stories of Resilience in Humanitarian Disasters: Responses and Challenges”.

Rathore’s article, titled “From Odisha to Kerala, a bus of climate migrants”, was published on May 10 as part of Common Ground, Scroll’s in-depth and investigative reporting project.

The article described the challenges of people from Odisha who first moved from a village named Satbhaya on the coast of the Bay of Bengal due to coastal erosion into a resettlement colony, and then to Kerala due to scant economic opportunities.

For the article, Rathore spoke to climate migrants who explained the struggles that relocated families in Odisha had to deal with. She also described her conversations with those who had gone to Kerala in search of work but longed to return to their native state.

The article noted that the Odisha coast has seen dramatic rises in sea levels in the past decades.

“A 2022 paper found that between 1966 and 2015, the sea level along Odisha’s coast rose 0.19 cm each year,” it said. “For Kendrapara district –...

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