Writer Venita Coelho won the Bal Sahitya Puraskar award for her book Deads a Dodo from the Sahitya Akademi.

Journalist Sameera Khan won the National Laadli Media Award for Gender Sensitivity 2020 for promoting sensitive reporting on gender-based violence and for her consistent engagement as a teacher, trainer, researcher and a journalist in promoting gender sensitivity in the media  gender sensitivity in media reporting.
Khan also co-authored the research study, "Locating Gender Perspectives in COVID-19 Reportage in India: An Analysis of Print Media (March 2020 to September 2020), supported by UNFPA, Population First & Network of Women in Media India, which looked at how the Indian print media covered the COVID-19 pandemic with a gender perspective. For this, she led a team of 13 researchers who analysed 12 publications in 7 languages. The full report launched on March 10, 2021 is accessible here.

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Actor Richa Chadha was the recipient of the Dr Ambedkar Award 2020 . The awards instituted by the Buddha Creation of Indian Cinema were presented in recognition of the social work done by the awardees during the corona pandemic period. She received the honor at the Raj Bhavan from the Governor of Maharashtra, Bhagat Singh Koshyari.
Along with her partner Ali Fazal, Chadha launched her production outfit Pushing Buttons Studios. Their first project is “Girls Will Be Girls,” the only Indian selection of the 10 projects chosen for the Berlinale Talents Script Station program. The script was also selected for the Jerusalem Sam Spiegel Film Lab, and it won a New York State Council of the Arts Grant for development. SCMite and New York-based AFI graduate Shuchi Talati is the scriptwriter and will direct the film. She has previously directed several shorts including “A Period Piece,” which was an SXSW selection in 2020. Crawling Angel’s Sanjay Gulati and Pooja Chauhan and Dolce Vita’s Claire Chassagne will produce the film alongside Chadha and Fazal. Pooja Chauhan completes the trio of SCMites working on this project. 

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Ad professional Purbali Mukherjee was part of the winning campaign, The Punishing Signal. The campaign won at the One Show: 3 Gold, 2 Bronze ,D&AD: 2 yellow, 2 graphite and 1 wood pencils and also the silver at the 2020 Clio Awards .’The Punishing Signal' was conceptualised for the Mumbai Police by FCBIndia Advertising LLP, Gurugram.

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The Netflix show Delhi Crime which won multiple awards this year feature not just actor and SCM alum Rasika Dugal but also Sanyuktha Chawla Shaikh who is credited with the Hindi dialogues for the same.

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Academician/Researcher Sunitha Chitrapu  was co-author on a book chapter about media economics as a research discipline in India, published in the Handbooks of Communication Science: Management and Economics of Communication. Parthasarathi, V., Chitrapu, S., & Elavarthi, S. P. (2020), ‘Media economics in India: Traversing the Rubicon’. In M. B. von Rimscha & S. Kienzler (Eds.), Handbooks of Communication Science: Management and Economics of Communication. (pp. 441-456). Boston/Berlin: Walter De Gruyter Inc. Chitrapu also completed the Yoga teacher's training course from The Yoga Institute, Mumbai.

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Children’s writer, Lubaina Bandukwala has a new picture book out - called Leopard in Mumbai , illustrated by Allen Shaw and published by Karadi Tales.
Lubaina’s children literature Festival Peek A Book also chronicled experiences of children across the country during the pandemic in a series of four online publications called Coronials. 

 

Entrepreneur, Kadambari Gupte has started her own brand of Handcrafted Soaps during the lockdown 2020 and through word of mouth and Instagram, she sold more than 900+ soaps. She has been featured by Elle India, tweak India, Indulge express, The channel 46 and more. Kadambari is also a freelance PR consultant by profession to fashion & lifestyle brands. 

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Yoga practitioner, Priyamvada Mangal got the opportunity to teach yoga to over a hundred people during the lockdown, courtesy online classes. She taught people from various walks of life including pilots, doctors, casting directors, from Kolkata, Lucknow, US, London etc. She enhanced her knowledge further and read various scriptures of yoga including Classical and Hatha Yogic texts as well as Yoga Upanishads and began blogging on Instagram, YouTube, and WordPress.  For Women's Day she was a part of a group that taught yoga to women commuters also taught the Western Railways staff at Churchgate. She is also contributing to an ebook by an Ayurveda brand and working on a book on yoga techniques.

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Nidhi Goel is the founder and Executive Director of Rising Flame, an NGO that works on advocacy and Interventions for changing the lives of persons with disabilities, particularly women and girls. During the pandemic the organisation is working especially to support people with disabilities who want to register online for Covid Vaccination and would need assistance. 

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Neha Jain is the Artistic Director of the International Kids Film Festival. The 2020 online version of the festival reached more than 10000 kids across India and featured 150 films from 40 countries. Jain also started her own venture- Trampoline Media, that focuses on creating and curating content for children.

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Filmmaker Anushka Shivdasani Rovshen of Running Cow films produced three films related to the pandemic. The first was From U2 Them - Unite against hunger. This film was made pro bono for an citizens initiative non-governmental organisation that came together in response to the pandemic in 2020. Watch it here.

The second film was called The New Normal. Its now playing on hotstar as well. Watch it here.

The third was a film that declared that a pandemic can't pause childhood: We've all had to find ways to nourish our souls during this lockdown. For Anushka, it's been about her family and constantly creating - this very simple film brought both the elements together. Watch it here. 

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Zara Mann joined Dungarpur Films as an Assistant Director in 2016. There she  worked on over 25 commercials for big brands like Dettol, Kinder Joy, Kissan, etc. and handled casting and even did costumes for a few. In 2018, she worked on her first web series as an Assistant Director for Mirzapur Season 2  which released on Amazon Prime. The show has been widely appreciated worldwide. She was  coordinating with the hair, makeup and costume teams and also managed the actors on set. In 2019 she worked on another web series for Hotstar which is scheduled to release by the end of this year. 

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Sukanya Deb, part of the alums who graduated during the pandemic, worked with Mandovi Menon as a content writer/curator and researcher for Apalam Chapalam and The Minor Project. Deb was also a publishing assistant for the English Bulletin team at 26th edition of Kolkata International Film Festival and also interned with Elle India’s digital editorial team. Most recently she joined VICE Asia Pacific as a video team intern and started off as a junior assistant producer in April. 

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Shabnam Minwalla has a spectafabulous year with three books out. Two are for children and one for adults. These were NImmi’s Spectafabulous Days; Nimmi’s Bizuper Birthday and Colaba: The Diamond at the tip of Mumbai (all from Speaking Tiger books).