Press freedom index puts focus on newsrooms telling India’s hardest stories

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on May 7, 2026

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2026/05/07/press-freedom-index-puts-focus-on-newsrooms-telling-indias-hardest-stories

Every year we are informed that India is sinking lower on the World Press Freedom Index put together by Reporters Without Borders. India now stands at 157 out of 180 countries. “So what?” says the government. “We know,” say journalists who have felt the brunt of this decline.

It is worth considering though what “press freedom” means for those engaged in the media – print, broadcast and digital – and especially the journalists who work outside the formal economy of the media as independent journalists.

Press freedom is dependent on many things, including laws made by the government. But protection under law is not enough, even in a democracy as we have experienced in India during the Emergency when all pretence of press freedom was abandoned in the name of national security. Even today, especially in the last decade, the same trope of national security is used to imprison journalists or to bring in curbs that in effect curtail the right of journalists to information.  

In fact, this is precisely what the RSF report highlights, the impact of the November 2025 rules the government published for the Digital Personal Data Protection Act (2023). “This new legal framework”, the report states, “directly undermines the fundamentals of journalism by restricting access to, processing of, and publication of certain types of information that could be of interest to the public, starting with administrative documents, public archives, and all other information that could implicate public officials or institutions entrusted with a mission of general interest”.

Apart from such direct intervention by the government that undercuts the very concept of a free media, we also see how this is further emasculated when a powerful executive teams up with private money power.

In India, big money and the executive have been known to come together to suppress reporting on issues that would be uncomfortable to both for decades. This trend consolidated post 1991 and liberalisation when the media, then mostly print media, became commercialised and news was redefined as something that would sell the “product”. That is when we saw the amplification of some and the erasure of others from the news pages. The rich, the politically powerful, celebrities were “news”; the poor, the working classes, the people living on the peripheries were not worth featuring.

That trend has now become an almost accepted feature where, as I argued in an earlier column, the dominant narrative suggested by the government is echoed uncritically by the media (barring a few exceptions). The economically powerful owners go along with this either because their politics matches that of the ruling party or because they are aware of the cost of not doing so given the extent to which the Modi government has weaponised the use of agencies to deal with any opposition.

In sum, India’s declining status on the World Press Freedom Index is no surprise.

Yet, we must consider who pays the price for this decline in media freedom. 

The brunt of the decline noted by the RSF is felt by those journalists working outside the frame of mainstream media. In fact, if there is journalism being done the way it should in a democracy, where your camera or your pen seeks out the voiceless, where you report irrespective of whose toes you tread on – big business or big government – because you believe it is a story that must be told, it is the growing tribe of independent journalists in India who are doing this.

They are not backed by any union or association that will come to their aid if they are arrested, bullied, attacked physically or virtually. In fact, even the big publications that they write for often back off when these journalists get embroiled in a court case initiated by a functionary of the ruling party. 

Despite this, it is encouraging that scores of independent journalists are not giving up. They continue to report and expose both business and government, and often both. To give just one example, the story of the environmentally devastating projects being planned in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands have been reported mainly by independent journalists for years (read here and here). They finally got noticed by the mainstream, albeit momentarily, when Congress leader Rahul Gandhi happened to visit the islands recently.

The other barometer of press freedom is what the media chooses to downplay or even ignore and why.

Coincidentally, World Press Freedom Day is two days after May 1, universally celebrated as International Workers’ Day, marking the struggle of workers for an 8-hour workday. I doubt if many people, especially the younger generation, are even aware of this struggle and its significance.  

But the coincidence also reminds us of the absence of reporting on trade unions, those that have survived despite liberalisation and the dominant contract system that most workers are compelled to accept. These workers are not invisible. They are everywhere, building our infrastructure, constructing private buildings, running the gig economy, working in farms. And then there are those who are virtually invisible, the men and women who work in the homes of the better off Indians at shockingly low pay.

These Indians make it past the barrier of what is considered newsworthy only when they organise, protest, clash with the police, get beaten up and are jailed as the recent protests in Noida highlighted. Though these protests were covered by print, much of the reporting was done by small independent platforms on social media.  Such as this where a worker tells a reporter, “We put our children to sleep hungry. We hold them to our chests and sing lullabies, so that they don’t remember their hunger.” 

We heard women and men speak about the shocking conditions at their places of work; not just how little they were paid (less than the minimum wage) but the mockery of the annual “increment” that they received. They spoke of how their pay was cut if they fell sick or had to travel for an emergency. And that after years of working in a factory, or as construction labour, there was no compensation if the factory closed or the contract work ended (read here). 

We also heard from domestic workers who are unorganised and who are in no position to demand higher wages as there are always people available to work for less. Such is the level of desperation. But to hear the stories of the women who speak of employers who haven’t given them a raise, who cut their wages if they absent themselves from work because of ill health or family emergencies, reminds us that this is India 2026, where those who labour still struggle for a living wage. 

Finding meaningful reporting on the working class is like searching for a needle in a haystack these days. Yet, there was a time, when major newspapers like The Hindu, Times of India, Indian Express had a labour reporter, someone whose job it was to report on the conditions of the working classes. That position disappeared around the time that news was redefined as anything that will attract eyeballs.

As a result, our so-called “free” media in India is dedicated only to reporting on those with economic and political heft while the bulk of this country remains outside the definition of “news”.  

It is significant that the RSF report zeroes in on the changes made by the Modi government to digital laws that will restrict reporting by the independent journalists who are telling stories that mainstream will not report. Perhaps we should see this as a sign of hope, that despite what appears to be their limited reach, the combined presence of so many feisty independent journalists has made a powerful government uncomfortable. 

Modi govt’s message for 2024, with blocking orders and an OCI cancellation

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on February 22, 2024

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2024/02/22/modi-govts-message-for-2024-with-blocking-orders-and-an-oci-cancellation

The Narendra Modi government hates the concept of ranking countries on a press freedom index, an exercise that Reporters Without Borders undertakes each year. The last such ranking, in 2023, placed India at 161 out of 180 countries, below others in our region, including Pakistan (150), Nepal (95), Sri Lanka (135) and Bhutan (90). Only Bangladesh has the distinction of being two notches lower at 163.

So, in 2024, will India’s ranking in this index sink further?

Going by the government’s actions since the beginning of this year, there is more than a good chance that it will.

On February 9, Caravan magazine received a notice from the Information and Broadcasting Ministry about an article it had published on February 1 titled, “Screams from the Army post”.  It was given two days to respond. The magazine did respond but the ministry was not satisfied. On February 11, a meeting on Zoom between representatives of the ministry and Caravan was held. Later, on the same day, the magazine received a notice that it must take down this article within 24 hours.

What was the offending article, that has now been taken down, about? It was a detailed story written by Jatinder Kaur Tur on allegations of torture by the Indian armed forces against civilians from Rajouri and Poonch in Jammu and Kashmir in December 2023. Three of the 25 men picked up for questioning died in army custody.

The government used Section 69A of the IT Act, a section that has been challenged in several high courts, to justify its action. The section permits the government to take down any content that it concludes threatens the “sovereignty, integrity, defence of India, security of the State, friendly relations with foreign states, or public order or for preventing incitement to the commission of any cognisable offence relating to the above”.

The government’s concerns about certain types of information coming out extends not just to platforms and publications located within India, but even those outside. Thus, in January, the Hate Tracker, a platform that documents incidents of hate speech and hate crimes in India, but is located outside the country, was blocked in India. This report in Article 14 sets out the details. The reason? The same as that used for the Caravan article under Section 69A.

The government has also demonstrated its inability to accept the right of foreign journalists based in India to report freely what they see and hear. On February 16,Vanessa Dougnac, a French journalist who has lived and worked in India for 25 years, was told she would have to leave the country. Her Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) status was withdrawn. She was told that her work was “inimical to the interest of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of India and to the interests of the general public”.

In a statement before she left, Dougnac said: “Today, I am unable to work and have been unfairly accused of prejudicing the interests of the state. It has become clear that I cannot keep living in India and earning my livelihood. I am fighting these accusations before the competent forums, and I have full faith in the legal process. But I can’t afford to wait for its outcome. The proceedings with respect to my OCI status have shattered me, especially now that I see them as part of a wider effort by the Government of India to curb dissent from the OCI community.” 

As one can imagine, a foreign correspondent being asked to leave on dodgy grounds has not gone unnoticed around the world. In a strong and explicit statement, RSF stated:

“Forcing a seasoned professional journalist to leave India after she had been based there for two decades reveals a very dark and deplorable image of what press freedom has become under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. With two months to go to general elections, the vice is tightening on foreign correspondents who try to cover India in a professional manner. We condemn the unacceptable way Vanessa Dougnac has been treated and the use of absurd accusations as a subterfuge to gag and intimidate outspoken reporters. The Indian authorities must guarantee journalists’ safety and freedom to work.”

The latest action of the government is an order sent to X on February 19 asking it to take down several accounts. Coincidentally, most of these are independent journalists using social media to report on the ongoing farmers’ agitation. These accounts provide us with detailed news about the agitation, about the way the farmers have had to face tear gas dropped by drones and rubber bullets fired by the security forces standing behind concrete barricades to prevent them from marching to Delhi. On February 21, the first death of one of these farmers – 24-year-old Shubhkaran Singh – from a bullet injury was reported.

Coincidentally, or perhaps not, one of the accounts taken down is that of independent journalist Mandeep Punia and his platform Gaon Savera. People might have forgotten that Punia was central to the reporting of the previous farmers agitation in 2021. In this article he wrote for Outlook magazine in 2021, he describes his arrest by the police, and the stories he heard and reported during those months.

Although X has complied with the government’s orders, as it has done in the past, this time it has issued the following statement: “In compliance with the orders, we will withhold these posts and accounts in India alone; however, we disagree with these actions and maintain that freedom of expression should extend to these posts.”

You might think one article, one foreign journalist being expelled, and a few social media accounts being taken down does not represent any real threat to freedom of the press in India. But it does.

 

What these three incidents in the first two months of 2024 illustrate is the intent of this government. Clearly, it is determined to do whatever it takes to suppress critical independent reporting.

It does not care what international groups like RSF think. It does not care where India is ranked in a press freedom index. It is only interested in ensuring that the narrative that it has endorsed about what is happening anywhere in this country, which is dutifully amplified by mainstream TV, is the one that all media should echo. Those who refuse, do so at their own risk.

 

In rare reports on the Adani empire, a reminder of independent media’s significance

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on December 15, 2022

Few would have heard the name of TV journalist Govind Wakade. He works for TV18 and is based in Pune. 

Wakade went to cover a function at Pimpri Chinchwad on December 10 where a Maharashtra government minister from the Bharatiya Janata Party, Chandrakant Patil, was speaking. During the meeting, someone in the audience was incensed enough at a remark made by Patil to hurl an inkpot at him. The moment was captured by Wakade on his camera. The clip was shared widely on social media.

The next day, on December 11, Patil claimed that the attack was planned and demanded an investigation. As reported here, he went further by asking: “How did that journalist get the exact angle when the ink was being thrown at me? Who is that journalist? If by tomorrow morning, this journalist is not traced, I will sit on a fast at Pimpri police station.”

The police responded promptly by finding Wakade and summoning him to the police station for questioning. They did not, however, arrest him.

This incident, and the minister’s comment, exemplifies the attitude of those in power towards the media. It also illustrates the reality of press freedom in India, tenuous at the best of times. Today, journalists are at risk even if they are simply doing their jobs, of recording events and reporting them.  

How did we descend to such depths? The annual report by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) on the media landscape in India is scathing.  The government, of course, will ignore it, as it has in previous years. Why should it care that India is ranked 150 out of 180 countries on the World Press Freedom Index? All that matters now, it seems, is that India is heading the G20!

The RSF report, however, is worth more than a passing glance. It calls India “one of the world’s most dangerous countries for the media” with “an average of three or four journalists killed in connection with their work every year.” 

Apart from flagging the violence that journalists face, and the very real possibility of arrest, the report also mentions the concentration of ownership in mainstream media. This is often overlooked in discussions about media freedom, but as we are seeing, when media owners and those holding political power come together, the idea of a free press becomes something of a mockery.

To quote from the report again:

“The Indian press is a colossus with feet of clay. Despite often huge stock market valuations, media outlets largely depend on advertising contracts with local and regional governments. In the absence of an airtight border between business and editorial policy, media executives often see the latter as just a variable to be adjusted according to business needs.”

“An airtight border” between the business side and editorial began crumbling a while back. I can remember from my time in the Mumbai edition of a national daily newspaper several instances where instructions came directly from the owners to the editors. For instance, reporters on the health beat were told that nothing critical should be reported about a particular hospital because the owners of the publication also served on the hospital’s board. Similarly, a news story quoting from an independent investigation into violation of workers’ rights by a leading multinational in Mumbai was dropped at the last minute because the company representative spoke directly to the owner who then instructed the editor. The newspaper received generous advertising from this company. This was in the 1980s. 

Today, not only are media houses treading on eggshells when it comes to the government, but they are also selective about writing critically about powerful business houses, especially those in complete sync with the current government. You see this every day in the choice of stories mainstream media chooses to highlight, and those it ignores.

On December 12, the Washington Post ran a frontpage story with the headline: “In Modi’s India, an empire built on coal”. It is highly unlikely that any of India’s leading national dailies would have run this story on their front pages, or even inside. The story caused something of a buzz on social media. Yet, those outside the social media realm, and who don’t read international publications, would not know of this investigative report because it was not reflected either by way of a comment, or a report in mainstream Indian media.

The story’s focus is a coal-fired power plant in Godda, in Jharkhand, that is part of the expanding empire of Gautam Adani. It reveals how rules were changed to accommodate the setting up of the plant which is scheduled to supply power to neighbouring Bangladesh courtesy of an agreement between our two countries. 

For an audience outside India, the story shows how India continues to use coal for power generation even as the world is moving away from fossil fuels due to the ugly reality of climate change. In India, the story illustrates how when people holding political power and private business work together, there is no obstacle too great that cannot be overcome. 

In this case, the private business happens to be owned by Gautam Adani, who is, as the Post reminds us, not only “the largest private developer of coal power plants and coal mines in the world”, but also “the second-richest person on the planet, behind Elon Musk” whose earnings have doubled just in the last three years. 

For those who follow some of these issues closely, much of what appears in the Post story has been reported before. The advantage the Post had was that it could cover the Bangladesh angle which an Indian publication would find difficult.  

In 2019, Scroll carried a detailed three-part investigation into the same power plant in Jharkhand. But these reports did not receive the kind of attention that has been accorded to the Washington Post story. 

The reports in Scroll in 2019 by Aruna Chandrasekhar are meticulous in their detail. They are well worth reading because they illustrate the kind of journalism that we need today but is sadly missing because media houses will not invest in the in-depth reporting that brings to light facts otherwise obscured. 

Her reports highlighted how the Jharkhand government, then ruled by the BJP, amended its energy policy in such a way that Adani got a higher price for the power generated. She spoke to the villagers who lost their land to the project, and also reported how converting the project into a special economic zonefacilitated saving of taxes and additional profits to the company. 

Holding the powerful to account does not relate only to the government. It also means the economically powerful, whose interests often coincide with those holding political power, as in the present case. That is why these stories on the Adani empire are so significant. They are also a reminder, yet again, of the importance of independent media, because even the most powerful will not be able to erase the facts recorded in such reports. 

India’s media is under siege, but what will it take for the public to care?

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on May 11, 2022

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2022/05/11/indias-media-is-under-siege-but-what-will-it-take-for-the-public-to-care

Do ordinary people really care about press freedom? Or is this just an elitist concern, although the elite in this country would not exert themselves to defend this particular freedom?

The question pops up periodically whenever there is a discussion on the state of the media in India.

According to the latest World Press Freedom Index compiled by Reporters Without Borders, or RSF, one journalist has been killed and 13 are in prison in India since January 2022. Many more work under the stress of death threats, surveillance and fighting innumerable court cases filed against them. In any country that claims to be a democracy, this does not indicate that there is complete press freedom. In fact, quite to the contrary.

This is precisely what the RSF ranking has shown – a steady decline in India’s ranking out of 180 countries surveyed. From 133 in 2016 to 142 in 2021 and 150 now, India’s fall has been quite precipitous.

The government, of course, will not accept this. Predictably, it sees all such reports as a conspiracy to defame India and sully its reputation as a shining example of democratic and press freedoms.

But it only has to look in the mirror to realise that the situation is far from “shining”. On the contrary, it gets murkier every day. On one side journalists who question, report and unearth realities are hounded, charged and sometimes even killed. On the other, you have the majority of the Indian media choosing to be an echo chamber of this government, repeating and amplifying everything it is told to do, or even when it is not explicitly told to do so.

Despite 75 years as an elected democracy, it is striking how the idea of a free press, or the absence of one, does not stir too many in the electorate. It would appear that the media really does not make much of a difference to the lives of ordinary people. Or perhaps it indicates our changed times, where what circulates on social media has more currency than news that is reported in the media.

But despite this indifference of the voting public, it goes without saying that without a free press, much of what is happening in this country would go unreported.

Yet, take the instance of the reporting during the two years of the Covid-19 pandemic in India. Especially during the second wave, at least some media, particularly independent digital news platforms, did report the devastating tragedy of lakhs of people dying on the way to hospitals, gasping for air without oxygen supply, and then being buried in shallow graves or simply thrown in the Ganga. Despite this, people did not connect what had happened to mismanagement by the central and state governments. Why?

According to Shoaib Daniyal of Scroll, the main reason voters failed to connect the daily human tragedies that played out during the second wave of the pandemic last year to the government’s mismanagement of the crisis was because of a “lack of media critique”.

He rightly points out: “Throughout the pandemic, big media houses – especially Hindi and English-languages outlets based in the National Capital Region – chose to avoid blaming the government for both the economic losses as well as the healthcare collapse. Instead, Covid-19 was portrayed as a global act of god that had affected each and every country in much the same way. Very few news reports made it to the mainstream Hindi and English media showing government malfunction or the fact that India was one of the worst-hit countries.”

If mainstream media had reported truthfully about the way the pandemic played out in the lives of people, would voters have made different choices in the elections that followed?

Looking back, there was a time when this did happen. In 1975, when Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency, press freedom went into hibernation. It only came out of it in January 1977, when the emergency was lifted before the March general election.

The media used the window between the end of the emergency and the election to expose the gross violations of the rights of poor people, particularly through the mass and forcible sterilisation campaigns and the demolitions of urban poor settlements. Indira Gandhi’s image as someone who cared for the poor was seriously dented. “Garibi hatao” had turned into “Garib hatao”. And it was the poor who voted wholeheartedly against her and the Congress party, leading to political change.

Given the state of the Indian media today, it is highly unlikely that its reporting on issues – like the “bulldozer injustice” story, for instance – will trigger political change. This story is being covered because it is happening in the national capital where most media houses are headquartered. There would have been little to no coverage had this kind of violation of the rights of poor people occurred in a remoter location. In any case, every day there are similar and even starker violations that take place in the rest of the country that are never reported.

Also telling is the fact that when the RSF report was released on May 3, which is designated as World Press Freedom Day, hardly any of the major media houses, or even print newspapers, chose to comment on it apart from carrying reports on its contents. It would appear that even we in the media don’t really care how free we are.

Krishna Prasad, former editor of Outlook, posted on Twitter under his media critique handle @churumuri that not even one English language newspaper out of 16 surveyed, or 15 Indian language papers in 22 states, bothered to comment on India’s ranking in the World Press Freedom Index. Only independent digital news platforms like Scroll and the Wire brought home the real significance of this report, as this strong editorial in the Wire sets out clearly and forcefully.

It concludes with these words: “The time for mincing words has long passed: India’s democracy is dying in bright daylight. And yet, this death is not inevitable. The press is under siege but must find ways to stand its ground, chronicle what is unfolding and raise its voice in solidarity with every journalist and media house in the firing line.”

The media is under siege in India and many journalists are literally on the firing line. But they are being killed or incapacitated in different ways, not just by bullets or beatings.

Let me end with the story of a rural journalist in Uttar Pradesh – Pawan Jaiswal. In 2019, the UP government charged him with conspiracy to defame the government because he made a film showing children in a Mirzapur village eating salt with their rotis as their midday meal. The midday meal scheme was conceived to ensure that the poorest children get at least one nutritious meal a day.

Jaiswal was doing what journalists are supposed to do – record and report the reality, often ugly and distressing, that unfolds daily in many parts of this country. But in the eyes of the UP government, this was a crime for which he had to be punished.

Tragically, Jaiswal died last week of cancer, a disease for which he did not earn enough as a rural journalist to get adequate treatment.

No one killed Jaiswal. But a system that criminalises journalists who are doing their jobs, and pays them so little that they can barely survive, is responsible for his death.