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Ritu Sarin

Ritu Sarin

Editor, Investigations, Indian Express, India

Ritu Sarin, 59, is currently Executive Editor (News and Investigations) in The Indian Express and has a career in journalism of over 35 years. She has earlier worked in The Delhi Recorder magazine, The Sunday magazine and The Pioneer newspaper. In 1996, she joined The Indian Express as head of its Investigative Bureau. In the Indian Express, Sarin led a team of investigative reporters and individually, wrote some memorable stories.

This included The Tata Tapes (1997); the expose on breech of security in Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee's office ( 2011); the illegal troop movement (2012); the inquiry report of the Army's Technical Support Division ( 2014); the Birla tax case (2015) and the Essar Leaks (2015). In 1999, Sarin was nominated to become a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and over the past few years, she has headed teams in The Indian Express which have probed bank accounts and off shore companies held by Indians in different tax havens. The first investigation was into Indians incorporating companies in the BVI (2013); the complete data on HSBC account holders (2015); the Panama Papers (2016) and the Paradise Papers (2017). In each case, the Government has set up tax probe teams and recovered sizeable amounts of undeclared tax. The Panama Papers internationally won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism. The latest ICIJ project which she led for the newspaper was the 2018 investigation into faulty implants and medical devices titled 'The Implant Files.' Recently, Sarin was nominated to be a founder member of ICIJ's network committee, responsible for expanding the organisation's membership base and to laise with the top rung of the investigative journalism body.

Sarin herself has been recipient of the 2007 Ramnath Goenka Journalist of the Year award. In 2011, she received the Prem Bhatia award for best investigative journalist and in 2017 she along with members of The Indian Express team received the Ramnath Goenka award for investigative journalism for the Panama Papers. In 2018, she was awarded the prestigeous International Press Institute (IPI-India) award for excellenge in journalism to be followed in 2019 by the Red Ink award of the Mumbai Press Club for the Implant Files investigation. Recently, Sarin has been nominated to be a founder member of Watchdog Asia, a new group of investigative reporters from all over Asia.

She has attended investigative conferences and conducted workshops in several countries and was a plenary session speaker at the 2017 Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Johanesburg. She is the author of a book, an investigative account of the assasination of Indira Gandhi, published by Penguin in 1990.

Shariff