Scroll’s Rokibuz Zaman on Wednesday won a 2025 Laadli Media Award for Gender Sensitivity in the English language web news report category.
Zaman received the honour for his article about how a disc jockey from Guwahati was held captive by her family to stop her from getting married to a Kashmiri Muslim man. He highlighted that police forces in three states – Assam, Maharashtra and Meghalaya – did not file a first information report against the woman’s family members, despite her partner filing multiple complaints.
The citation for the award said that Zaman had been conferred the award for “spotlighting a chilling case of family control and police apathy in obstructing an inter-faith marriage, and for foregrounding the urgent need to uphold women’s agency and choice”.
Read: How a Guwahati DJ was held captive by her family to stop her marriage to a Muslim man
The Laadli Media Award was instituted in 2007 by Population First, a nonprofit supported by the United Nations Population Fund. The awards honour, recognise and celebrate the efforts of those in news media and advertising who highlight gender sensitivity.
Zaman was also among the winners of the award in 2024 for his reporting on how Assam Police’s crackdown on child marriage in February 2023 led to broken families.
On Wednesday, Scroll’s Johanna Deeksha also won a jury citation for her article on how an iPhone manufacturing facility in Tamil Nadu’s Sriperumbudur placed restrictions on the movements of its women workers. The factory is run by Foxconn, a Taiwanese company that is the world’s largest contract manufacturer of electronics.
The article was part of Scroll’s Common Ground series.
Read: India’s iPhone factory is keeping women workers isolated
