A year on, Indian media is still to tell the full story of the lockdown

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on March 18, 2021

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/03/18/a-year-on-indian-media-is-still-to-tell-the-full-story-of-the-lockdown

 

As anniversaries go, we are on the cusp of one that the government is unlikely to mark but the ordinary people of India will remember for years to come. On March 24, 2020, at 8 pm, the prime minister appeared on national television and, without prior warning, announced a national lockdown that would come into effect in four hours.

Even the shock of his demonetisation announcement on November 8, 2016, also at 8 pm, did not compare to this. The common factor in both announcements, three and a half years apart, was that the poor were the ones who paid the price.

As we approach March 24, 2021, the poor in India are still paying the price for that fateful decision.

The lockdown was necessitated, we were told, to curb the spread of coronavirus. But despite the cruel and often heartless implementation of the lockdown, the virus continued to spread over the next six months. Today, the cases are lower than at the peak, but the crisis has not ended. In all, the virus has afflicted at least 1.14 crore Indians and killed more than one and half lakh.

What have we in the media learned from our coverage of the pandemic, including the impact of the lockdown?

Let us remember that two days before this announcement, Narendra Modi and some of his ministers had met with media owners and editors. According to this report by Sagar in Caravan magazine, "The prime minister’s website reported that the journalists committed to 'work on the suggestions of the prime minister to publish inspiring and positive stories' about COVID-19. After the interaction, some owners and editors who were present in the meeting took to Twitter to thank the prime minister for making them a part of the video conference and seeking their opinions, while others published reports on the meeting on the front page the next day, with photos of themselves and Modi on the television screen."

The tone of acceptable coverage was set. The government desired "positive" stories. But the fallout of the lockdown was anything but positive as lakhs of men and women, who had migrated to cities for work, fled on foot or with whatever they could find by way of transport to return to their homes thousands of kilometres away. That was the big story, one that no media house, however "positive" it wanted to be, could ignore.

It is the visuals of the great Indian exodus, perhaps one of the greatest that this country has seen since Partition, that will live on as the abiding memory of 2020, a year when the pandemic overwhelmed all else.

Yet, today, if we look at the media, we would be hard put to remember that this actually happened. We still do not have a clear picture of how many of those men and women returned; if they did whether they found work and shelter; if they did not whether they were able to eke out a living in their villages; and how many of them were afflicted by the disease that upended their precarious lives on March 24.

Many journalists did an exemplary job capturing the human tragedy unfolding across India. It was not an easy task. Even as they set out to report, their colleagues in the media were losing their jobs and media houses were unwilling to put the resources needed for such reporting. Despite this, we read stories that will be remembered.

An angle that was missed by most media platforms was that of gender. Migrants were mostly men, but there were also women. Some were part of families, but there were many women who had migrated to cities for work and were stranded without jobs or some place to live. Their stories were largely missing in the reportage.

This is one of the important findings of a study conducted by Population First and the Network of Women in Media, India on the gender perspective of the media coverage of the pandemic. Released last week, it is worth a closer look not just for the statistics but because it brings out a point that is relevant for the media at all times: that a gender perspective needs to be integrated into all reporting if we want to tell the full story. Without it, we miss out on literally half the population, particularly so during a crisis.

The study restricted its analysis to print media and looked at coverage from March to September 2020. It studied a sample of 12 mainstream newspapers in seven languages and found that only 4.8 per cent of the 6,110 news items analysed had "anything of significance with regard to women and/or gender issues".

That story, of how women and girls survived through this year of the pandemic, has still to be told in full. In fact, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home Affairs has found that there has been an increase in cases of domestic violence and trafficking. According to the report, "The female migrant workers and their children were trafficked and had gone missing during lockdowns.” But we have read little of this in the media.

Also, apart from domestic workers, about whom there have been some reports, there are thousands of women in the service industry who have lost their jobs. Where are these women? What are they doing? How have they survived? We also know little of what women faced when their men returned to the village without a job.

The other challenge that the media continues to face is how to cover the pandemic. After a while, the data means little to readers. They look at the daily numbers, which must be reported, but often fail to make the connections.

The media has been constantly challenged, not just in India but around the world, to find ways to keep on telling this story, of a virus that continues to spread, of health services breaking down, of growing fear and anxiety and of the lives that have been devastated by suffering and loss.

Currently, we also face the dilemma of how to report on the safety of the vaccines being administered. Initially, there was the controversy about the home-grown Covaxin that was cleared for emergency use even though its phase three trials were not complete.

And now we have controversies surrounding the AstraZeneca vaccine that has been rolled out as Covishield in India. Several countries in Europe have suspended its use. Yet, the World Health Organisation reiterates it is safe.

How do we in the media report this when several lakh people in this country have already received the first dose? Most people only read headlines. How can we ensure that what is reported is science-based and balanced?

The jury is still out on this but the dilemma is a genuine one. You cannot ignore these reports, or the adverse reactions to the vaccine reported in India, even if they are a handful. At the same time, as several experts have emphasised, the percentage of adverse reactions is so low that they ought not to undermine confidence in the efficacy of the vaccine.

Objectivity and balance is often a fine line that the media has to tread. As Marty Baron, who recently retired as editor of the Washington Post put it in this interview with the New Yorker: "The idea of objectivity – I should make clear – it’s not neutrality, it’s not both-sides-ism, it’s not so-called balance. It’s never been that. That’s not the idea of objectivity. But once we do our reporting, once we do a rigorous job and we’re satisfied that we’ve done the job in an appropriate way, we’re supposed to tell people what we’ve actually found. Not pretend that we didn’t learn anything definitive. Not meet all sides equally if we know that they’re not equal. It’s none of that. It’s to tell people in an unflinching way what we have learned, what we have discovered."

Can the Indian media report in an "unflinching way" given the attitude of this government towards it?

If we had any doubts about that, they have been firmly dispelled by what is perhaps the most significant story of this year, as far as the media is concerned. A group of ministers met last year and discussed how to make the media fall in line and "neutralise" those who do not, as reported in Caravan and elsewhere. The ministers also consulted a number of journalists, one of whom reportedly suggested colour coding journalists into green for the undecided, black for opponent and white for supporter. There has been no official denial of this meeting.

If we read the details of the meetings, now available in the public domain, and also consider the pre-lockdown messages from the government to the media, its strategy for media control is crystal clear. The latest move that will affect the few spaces that still remain for critical and independent coverage of events could be the Information Technology Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code Rules, 2021 that will regulate digital news platforms.

The message is literally staring us in the face in black and white.

 

India faces an environmental crisis, but this season’s election coverage is set to ignore it

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on March 4, 2021

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/03/04/india-faces-an-environmental-crisis-but-this-seasons-election-coverage-is-set-to-ignore-it

Once again, election season is upon us. In fact, in India, it never seems to end. And for some political parties, it's perennial.

From now until the results are declared for the Assembly elections in Kerala, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Assam, and Puducherry on May 2, we can expect little else in media coverage apart from the political circus.

For the news media, the electoral battlefield provides endless possibilities and a chance to increase readership and viewership. Elections are guaranteed to be entertaining with every politician extracting the maximum advantage from media attention. Yet, increasingly, elections have been reduced to a few personalities; the issues that matter to the majority of voters slip into the background.

No doubt, despite the election frenzy, the coronavirus pandemic and the effort to vaccinate a large section of India's population will continue to be a part of the news cycle for some time to come as this crisis shows few signs of abating at present.

Yet, the political tamasha unleashed with the announcement of elections should not let us forget the perennials, the stories that are either told in passing, or only when there is a tragedy of such overwhelming proportions that they cannot be ignored.

Issues like hunger, poverty, unemployment, caste discrimination, inequality, atrocities against women, human rights, and persecution of minorities – the list is long. We remember, and the media addresses these, when there are atrocities, like the disturbing number of incidents involving Dalit girls being killed in Uttar Pradesh, or reports that remind us that almost a third of Indian children continue to be stunted and malnourished.

When a natural disaster occurs, such as in Uttarakhand on February 7, we are reminded that global warming and climate change are not academic issues but a living reality for people in fragile ecological zones as this interview with Ravi Chopra of the People's Science Institute in Dehradun spells out.

We remember then that these very areas have suffered in the past, that we in the media investigated and reported about those disasters and that the government appointed committees to investigate and recommend policies that kept in mind ecological factors. And that after all that, the developmental plans put in place, such as building hydroelectric projects in this fragile ecosystem, continued as if nothing had happened. Until it did again.

Even if governments have short memories and choose to forget lessons from previous disasters, the job of the media to continue to focus on some of these issues cannot be overemphasised. These issues slip from popular consciousness if our focus shifts, or disappears altogether, making it virtually impossible for the people living in such perennial disaster zones to be heard by those who make policy.

The same argument can be applied to industrial pollution and neglect of safety measures by industries using hazardous materials.

On May 7, 2020, poisonous styrene gas leaked out of the LG Polymer chemical plant at R R Venkatapuram in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh. Eleven people died and hundreds were affected by the gas in the villages around the plant. The reason was malfunction in the cooling system in two chemical tanks that had been left unattended.

In the wake of the accident, the media woke up. Stories were written. We were also reminded that this accident was smaller in scale but similar in several ways to what is still called the world's worst industrial disaster: the Bhopal gas tragedy where 40 tonnes of methyl isocyanate escaped from a Union Carbide plant in December 1984. Thousands of people were killed that night and many more in subsequent months and years. The health of those who survived was permanently impaired. And till today these victims of the Bhopal tragedy feel they never got justice.

But the point about remembering Bhopal was that it brought up the issue of location of industries using hazardous chemicals. The people most affected that night in Bhopal were those living in a dense settlement literally outside the gates of Union Carbide. Thirty six years later, those who suffered in Visakhapatnam were those living in close proximity to the LG Polymers plant. What has changed?

This unchanging scenario of industrial location is replicated in the way industries continue to pollute air, water and land despite environmental laws, and the existence of institutions that are tasked to ensure their implementation. This is one of the more distressing facts to emerge from the latest State of India's Environment 2021 report released by the Centre for Science and Environment, or CSE.

The Central Pollution Control Board set up a Comprehensive Environment Pollution Index, or CEPI, in 2009 with a view to monitor industrial clusters and the pollution levels around them.

Between 2009 and 2018, reports the CSE, rather than an improvement in these levels, there has been a sharp deterioration. Of the 88 industrial clusters that were monitored in this period, air quality had deteriorated in 33, water quality in 45, and land pollution had increased in 17. In other words, despite a system that kept track of whether the industries located in these places were following pollution control norms, the environmental parameters had become worse.

Surely, this is a statement not just about the inefficiency of pollution control boards, or rather their inability to enforce environmental regulation, but also the attitude of those owning industries that continue to pollute and stop only if caught and/or penalised. We also need to investigate how badly the health of people living near these polluted industrial clusters has been affected.

Going back to Uttarakhand, in 2010 the National Green Tribunal Act was passed. This was done expressly so that people affected by developmental projects, such as thermal power plants, or mining, could have a say before these projects were cleared under provisions of the Environment Protection Act 1986.

However, often poor communities do not hear about a project, or that it has been cleared, until the process is almost complete. By the time they can get organised and summon up the resources to file an appeal against such a project before the National Green Tribunal, it is often too late because a time limit has been set.

This story by Jay Mazoomdaar in the Indian Express points out how the NGT continues to dismiss appeals on minor technical grounds rather than being sympathetic to the people who turn to it. It had replaced the earlier National Environmental Appellate Authority precisely because an independent and fair system was needed to hear the complaints of project-affected communities that are often also the most marginalised. In this instance too, there is a story still waiting to be told about the groups that turned to the NGT, who they are, and how they see the future.

Environmental journalism is at the cross-section of politics, policies and people. It is challenging precisely for that reason as it asks of journalists an understanding of all this as well as technical aspects. Gone are the days when newspapers had environmental correspondents tasked to investigate and write such stories. Now it is left to dedicated organisations like CSE and its journal, Down to Earth, Mongabay India, a portal specialising in environmental and conservation related stories, or the Third Pole.

The deterioration in our natural environment, and the continuing and willful pollution of our water, air and land, takes the heaviest toll on the poor, but ultimately affects everyone. Despite this, environmental concerns have hardly ever featured in election talk or on the agenda of political parties. It is highly doubtful that the election season we have entered will see a change in this.