Disha Shetty wins award for article on solar power empowering women co-published by Scroll

Independent journalist Disha Shetty on Tuesday won the Asian Development Bank Institute’s prestigious Developing Asia Journalism Awards for her article about how the push towards scaling up solar energy in India was impacting the lives of women in rural Rajasthan.

The story was reported for The Fuller Project and co-published with Scroll.

“I am thrilled to be one of the winners of this year’s Developing Asia Journalism Awards,” said Shetty in a social media post on Tuesday. “It was an honour to also speak to the team at Asian Development Bank Institute in Tokyo on the takeaways from my reporting for policymakers.”

In her story published in May 2023, Shetty had highlighted that solar-powered refrigerators had solved the problem of expensive and unreliable electricity from the grid for women who had come together to form a dairy cooperative.

With a reliable electricity source, the women were able to double their income.

“Before, half our milk would go bad because of frequent power cuts,” the chairperson of a dairy had told Shetty. “Now, even if we have leftover milk, we can sell it the next day and because our wastage is down to almost zero, the profits for most of the women have doubled.”

Announcing the award winners in May, the Asian Development Bank Institute’s Dean Tetsushi Sonobe...

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