[11] For his "exemplary stewardship" of The Indian Express that saw a "focus on investigative journalism", Jha was named Journalist of the Year by the Mumbai Press Club at Redink Awards, 2017.
In March 2023, speaking at the RNG Awards in the presence of the Chief Justice of India Dhananjaya Y. Chandrachud, Jha called the Supreme Court the North Star for journalists for expanding the freedom of the press over the years.
His sixth and latest novel The Patient in Bed Number 12,[17] published in 2023, tracks a viral hate video, a dying father in search of the living and a daughter who follows her head and heart.
Poet and critic Ranjit Hoskote wrote this "dazzling kaleidoscope" of a novel is a "superbly Sebaldian" take on the trauma and horror of a people who have lost agency.
[18] His fifth novel The City And The Sea,[19] published by Penguin Hamish Hamilton in 2019, "cleaves open India's tragedy of violence against women with a powerful story about our complicity in the culture that supports it."
Nobel Laureate, economist and philosopher Amartya Sen has called it a "gripping narrative of human predicament and surviving hope, yielding an extraordinary combination of philosophy and allegory.
Taking off from the 2012 Delhi gang rape, the novel "builds a narrative around a life disrupted by such an incident by delving into the past of one of the perpetrators (the juvenile), and the victim's impossible future (as a mother).
"[23] Describing its writing as "gorgeous", Kirkus Reviews says it uses "magic to illuminate violence, poverty and loss" and shines light on the "ugly highs and lows of modern India".
[24] Writer and critic Alex Clark writes in The Guardian: "Everywhere, scale is out of whack: tiny dwellings are dwarfed by teetering towers; choked roads are closed by massing protesters and water cannons; spiralling sums of money are set against almost unfathomable deprivation.
The Blue Bedspread, by Jha, was chosen as one of the ten books for 1992-2001 along with works by Nobel Laureates Abdulrazak Gurnah and J. M. Coetzee; Arundhati Roy, Yann Martel, Zadie Smith, Michael Ondaatje, Rohinton Mistry, Carol Shields and Earl Lovelace.
[28] Writing on "The Patient in Bed Number 12," scholar and translator Arshia Sattar said: "Jha is a grammarian of our time parsing the news in his novels.
He suspends his work in a realm of improbability, where it is possible to think the unthinkable...Perhaps the biggest taboo that Jha seeks to breach is the sacrosanct, hierarchical structure of the family.
Reviewing Jha's fourth novel, "She Will Build Him A City," The Saturday Paper, the Australian cultural weekly, called it "conceptually daring and important beyond entertainment".
The importance of the novel, it wrote, is the fact that "if the Indian economy is a tiger on the verge of roaring, the world should hear the stories of the people who have fed it with their blood.