Let's Recognise Our Unsung Sikh Heroes
MEET THE FINALISTS OF
The Australian Sikh Awards for Excellence 2026
Excellence In Agriculture
Agyakar, Manjinder and Kamaljit Singh Grewal
Agyakar, Manjinder and Kamaljit Singh Grewal were born into a Punjabi farming family and left India in 1988, spending twelve years running a restaurant and greengrocer in New Zealand before returning to the land they knew. From a vineyard at Renmark they built Golden Grain Mills at Cullulleraine, now milling thousands of tonnes of Victorian wheat a year alongside almonds, citrus and berries. When drought struck in 2007 they shipped a traditional stone mill from Punjab rather than walk away. The mill buys from neighbouring farms, sustains regional jobs, and carries forward the Sikh conviction that feeding people is service.
John Paramjit Singh
John Paramjit Singh has farmed the Byron Shire for more than fifty years, raising pigs and building Byron Bay Pork into a respected brand along Australia’s east coast, twice winning best in class at the Sydney Royal Easter Show. The Royal Agricultural Society has recognised him as a Champion for his contribution to its competitions. He has served the Bangalow Lions Club since 1978 and received the James Richardson Honours Award in 1995 for that service. In 2004 he and his father established Bangalow’s Gurdwara, giving local Sikh families a place to worship and keep their traditions, seva that outlasts a single lifetime.
Excellence In Arts, Culture, or Music
Simarjit Kaur
Simarjit Kaur is the founder of Melodia to Bliss Music School, a Gurmat Sangeet educator, researcher, multi-instrumentalist and PhD candidate in music. She works to preserve Sikh musical heritage while carrying its message beyond the community, through teaching, workshops, interfaith performances and a music therapy informed practice that builds confidence, mindfulness and connection. Having come through hard years herself, she teaches from the conviction that music helps people rise and rebuild. Passing a sacred tradition to young Australians growing up far from Punjab, and offering it freely across faiths, is her seva.
Manpreet Singh Dhillon
Manpreet Singh Dhillon is a Detective in the Family Violence Investigation Unit of the Western Australia Police, protecting some of the state’s most vulnerable people. His work is seva in practice, service given where it is hardest and least visible. Beyond the force he co-founded Panjabi Pod, a bilingual business education platform, turning the lived experience of founders into practical guidance for others. He is a committed advocate for women in business, arguing that economies grow when more women lead them. Through both roles he strengthens Australian community safety and contributes directly to small business growth.
Bali Padda
Bali Padda is a Sikh Australian director, producer and actor working across theatre and screen. His screen work includes the Logie nominated Optics and the Emmy nominated All Her Fault. He made his stage directing debut with Guards at the Taj at Riverside Parramatta, and has since directed and produced Sunderella, Champions, King James and Sex Magick. As a screen executive at Screen Australia and Screen NSW, and across four unpaid years chairing the MEAA Equity Diversity Committee, he has given seva to widening who tells Australian stories. In 2024 he founded Little Goat Arts and Entertainment, making space for nuanced, brave stories reflecting the richness of Australia’s diverse communities.
Excellence In Community Service
Harmohan Singh Walia
Harmohan Singh Walia, a Mechanical & Industrial Engineer by profession, has dedicated 35 years to community service, interfaith dialogue, and uplifting others through leadership and seva reflecting the Sikh values of humility, hard work, and giving back. An Olympic Torchbearer in Sydney 2000, a Punjabi radio broadcaster covering multicultural stations including SBS Punjabi and a community photographer covering 6,000+ events. Has compiled four coffee table books on Indo-Australian diaspora’s success. With resilience forged through life’s challenges, he continues to inspire youth and families to lead with integrity and compassion. Harmohan believes in building stronger, united communities rooted in love, respect, and faith.
Ravinder Singh Sahni
Ravinder Singh Sahni is a Canberra-based community leader guided by the Sikh values of Seva, selfless service, and Sarbat da Bhala, the welfare of all. He coordinated front-line COVID-19 relief, led mobile food drives, and mentors youth and newly arrived migrants, bridging cultural gaps and building lasting support systems across the nation’s capital. To drive change beyond immediate relief, he has spearheaded a major initiative with the ACT Government to integrate the Punjabi language into the ACT school curriculum. His advocacy strengthens social cohesion and helps new Australians participate more fully in the economy.
Japinder Singh Sandhu
Japinder Singh Sandhu is an emergency services volunteer and community leader whose work is driven by the Sikh principle of seva, selfless service. He has served six years with the Country Fire Authority as an operational firefighter and Communications Officer, and three years with Victoria State Emergency Service as an operational member, Deputy Controller for Community Engagement and founding member of the Point Cook Unit. He is the first Australian Sikh to receive the CFA Champion Firefighter of the Year Award, and was honoured with the Lalor HERO Award and the Assistant Minister’s Multicultural Leaders Award for building a safer, more inclusive Australia.
Excellence In A Professional Field
Dr Narinder Pal Singh
Associate Professor Narinder Pal Singh is Head of Otolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery at Westmead Hospital and Associate Professor at the University of Sydney. Raised in a farming family in Griffith, New South Wales, he has published over 90 scientific papers and delivered more than 270 international presentations, and has supervised 14 completed PhDs and Masters. He is an international authority on using Computational Fluid Dynamics and Artificial Intelligence to improve healthcare for underserved populations. His flagship project, DrumBeat.ai, applies AI to ear disease in rural and remote Aboriginal children, work that reflects seva and lifts health outcomes for communities Australian medicine has long underserved.
Dr Ajit Singh Bhalla
Dr Ajit Singh Bhalla is the State Clinical Director and Lead for Urgent Care in Queensland with ForHealth Group, one of Australia’s largest primary healthcare providers, and an Adjunct Professor at the University of the Sunshine Coast. He has played a leading role in expanding Australia’s Medicare Urgent Care network, improving access to high-quality, bulk-billed healthcare across the state. Dr Bhalla also contributes to national health policy through the Australian Department of Health and Aged Care. Guided by the Sikh principles of seva, compassion and equality, he is committed to clinical excellence, mentoring future clinicians, and serving communities with humility.
Ravi Inder Singh Nijjer AM
Captain Ravi Inder Singh Nijjer AM has spent more than sixty years in the maritime industry, from sailing merchant ships out of India to leading marine transport at RMIT Melbourne. He rewrote the Master Class I syllabus for ship’s masters, which was adopted across the Australian maritime industry, and led the first published evaluation of GPS for marine navigation, work taken from Port Phillip Bay to the world. In 2022 he was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia for significant service to maritime transport safety. Now in his eighties he still gives his time to training the pilots who bring the largest ships into Australian harbours.
Excellence In Sports
Hasrat Kaur Gill
Hasrat Kaur Gill is one of Australian cricket’s fastest-rising young talents. Born in Amritsar and raised in Melbourne, she represents Victoria in the Women’s National Cricket League and Sydney Thunder in the Women’s Big Bash League, and has represented Australia at Under-19 level. She uses the platform sport has given her to widen it for others, showing young Sikh Australians, particularly girls, that elite sport is open to them without setting aside who they are. That visibility is its own form of seva, and her rise strengthens the case for a more representative national game.
Sukhvir Kaur (Sukhi Bal)
Sukhvir Kaur, known as Sukhi Bal, is a Sydney-based corrections officer, Masters athlete and mountaineer. In 2026 she became the first Punjabi woman and the 25th Australian woman to summit Mount Ama Dablam, 6,812 metres, one of the world’s most technically demanding alpine climbs, reciting Rehras Sahib at the summit. Her working life is seva in a hard place, spent inside the New South Wales corrections system. Off the mountain she encourages women and young people to test their limits, and her achievement has drawn national attention to Sikh Australian women in sport.
Gursher Singh Maan
Gursher Singh Maan is a Sydney-based international athlete and Athletics Australia Level 3 Performance Coach. He founded and heads Glenwood Athletics and Sports Club, Australia’s first Indian-origin athletics club affiliated with NSW Athletics and Athletics Australia. He has represented Australia four times, winning silver in long jump at the 2025 World Police and Fire Games, and was named Blacktown City Council Coach of the Year in 2024. He now coaches more than 200 athletes aged four to fifty-five, three days a week. The club is seva made practical, opening a pathway into Australian athletics for a community that previously had none.
Australian Sikh Woman of the Year
Bijinder Dugal OAM
Bijinder Dugal OAM is co-founding Director of AASHA Australia Foundation, a volunteer-run charity established in 2017 to support the health and wellbeing of older members of Australia’s Indian community. Its programs cover active ageing, dementia awareness, elder rights and social inclusion, and she has partnered with health and education organisations on elder abuse awareness and financial safety. She was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in the 2026 King’s Birthday Honours for service to aged welfare. Her work is sustained seva, easing isolation among older Australians and helping families care for their elders.
Amritpal Kaur
Amritpal Kaur is the first turbaned Sikh woman to serve in the Australian Defence Force, a path she has walked while remaining firmly rooted in her faith. She is also an accomplished athlete, having competed at state and national level and held number one rankings in Australia, Oceania and the world, and is the first turbaned Sikh woman to qualify as an Australian national-level athletics referee. Beyond her own achievements she gives her time to promoting women’s fitness and wellbeing through long-distance running, community engagement and mentoring. Her service in uniform and her mentoring of women are both seva.
Dr Sitanshu Arora
Dr Sitanshu Arora is a Melbourne-based dental leader whose career reflects excellence, resilience and seva. A migrant Sikh woman who rebuilt her profession in Australia, she progressed from Australian Dental Council registration to postgraduate distinction, national examining for RACDS, service on the Australian Dental Council Accreditation Committee, and a board directorship with the Australian Dental Association Victorian Branch. As Principal of Central Park Dental she has completed more than 14,000 clinical hours and cared for over 17,600 patients across public dentistry, Aboriginal health services and special needs care, while mentoring more than 300 emerging dentists and supporting survivors of domestic violence through Rebuilding Smiles.
Young Australian Sikh of the Year
Maneet Singh
Maneet Singh is an award-winning industrial designer and lead designer at Orbitkey, an Australian design brand selling in more than 100 countries. A James Dyson Award national winner, Good Design Award winner and two-time Victorian Premier’s Design Award recipient, he designs in the spirit of seva, for the people design usually overlooks. His work includes AirLift, a pneumatic device letting a single healthcare worker reposition a patient safely, and Reverie, a dementia care system built on clinical Reminiscence Therapy. He steered Orbitkey’s largest Kickstarter campaign past one million Australian dollars and mentors the next generation of Sikh creatives.
Navleen Kaur Sandhu
Navleen Kaur Sandhu moved from Amritsar to Australia at eight and struggled to find a sense of belonging until her father introduced her to cricket. Within a year of picking up a bat she was representing Victoria, and in 2025 she was named in Victoria Metro’s Under 19 Female Emerging Players Program squad. She now coaches young athletes to build the same confidence and belonging the game gave her, and hopes to represent Australia and qualify as a physiotherapist. Inspired by her parents’ sacrifices, she treats coaching as seva, returning to the game what it first gave her.
Hukambir Singh Kohli
Hukambir Singh Kohli, son of immigrant parents, grew up in Perth and only began connecting with Sikhi at university. That is when he founded the UWA Sikh Society, now one of the largest Sikh student societies in Australia. He later became the first turbaned Sikh elected to the UWA Student Guild Council. Over the past two years he and his team have run Langar on Campus, serving free meals to more than a thousand students on a campus where Sikhi was unknown. He is studying the Juris Doctor and wants to use his future legal career in service of others.
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