Anto Akkara
"Bear witness to the truth"
With masters in English literature, post graduate diploma in journalism and LL. B from Delhi University, Anto Akkara has been a journalist with Indian and international media for three decades. The journalist author, who firmly believes that 'the pen is mightier than the sword’, has reported extensively from hotspots in South Asia on human rights, religious issues and social problems.
Akkara has to his credit several 'leader' articles for The Times of India - like ‘Tribals are not museum pieces’, ‘Prisons of the Mind (Myanmar)’ and ‘Lankan landmine’ etc - on sensitive topics and his international investigative reports have been carried even in The Washington Post.
He has covered extensively the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka, 2004 tsunami devastation, oppression in Myanmar, and birth of democracy and devastating earthquake that struck Nepal in 2015. In the process, he won a dozen national and international media awards.
For his ‘stellar work’ on Kandhamal conflagration in Odisha state in eastern India, Akkara was conferred the prestigious Titus Brandsma Award for Journalism 2013, instituted in memory of a Dutch journalist Titus Brandsma who was incarcerated for his critical writings against Hitler and died in the infamous Dachau concentration camp in 1942.
In December 2018: Akkara was conferred the ‘Journalist of Substance’ award of Delhi Minorities Commission for his persistent campaign for Truth & Justice for Kandhamal.