Dainik Bhaskar’s Bhaskar Champs Club bags WAN-IFRA Award

Dainik Bhaskar Group and Bhaskar Champs Club have been awarded the WAN-IFRA: India Award - World Young Reader Country of the Year 2013 award, which was conferred by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) at the Youth Engagement Summit in Europe.

As part of this award, India has been designated the 2013 World Young Reader Country of the Year in the annual Young Reader Prize competition by WAN-IFRA.

This acknowledgment recognises Bhaskar Group’s efforts to develop innovative ways to attract young people to news in India.

As a combined group from India, the entries included eight Indian publications, including The Dainik Bhaskar Group, which exhibited phenomenal creativity, great enthusiasm and deep commitment to draw Indian youth towards consuming news through interesting means and unique reader engagement techniques for the young-reader category. This is only the second time such a move has been made in the 15-year history of the ‘Young Reader Prize’, where a single winner award has been changed into a country award. Brazil was the first such honoree in 2005.

Several Bhaskar Group branded flagship events were also acknowledged for this award. The noted endeavours were: “Junior Editor II”, a competition that ended with more than 300,000 children creating 12-page newspapers based on a template in four languages. In addition, Divya Bhaskar carried out a two-month Funtoosh activity, which encouraged students to do something besides study, specifically extra-curricular activities, to learn about their latent talents and then showcase those talents in a series of local shows. A total of 2,165 children had taken part in this activity.