Documenting the Pandemic

Book review in The India Forum

Published on June 23, 2026 

Link: https://www.theindiaforum.in/book-reviews/documenting-pandemic

Documenting Lost Time: Reports from a Recent Pandemic
Edited by Nalini Rajan
Orient BlackSwan, 2026

The Covid-19 global pandemic, which stretched three years from 11 March 2020 to 5 May 2023, has left behind questions that still await answers, scars that have yet to heal, and fears that cannot be easily dispelled. The concoction of misinformation, inadequate and unreliable information, and medical interventions falling well short of needs left behind not just disease and death, but also trauma and fear that have not entirely disappeared.

Official claims were exposed as gross underestimations when images of half-submerged corpses on the banks of the Ganga appeared, along with stories by independent media.

Capturing all of this is not an easy task. The book under review attempts to document what it calls “lost time” through 17 essays that cover the journey of the pandemic through India.

Edited volumes are often uneven, as is this one. However, it contains individual essays that together provide useful information and perspectives as we look back on the Covid-19 pandemic.

The most comprehensive is “The Virus and the Viral: The Use and Abuse of Information During the Pandemic” by senior journalist Pamela Philipose. She divides the different kinds of fake news that circulated over that time into three categories: first, the narrative controlled and propagated by the government; second, the communal propaganda in the initial months; and third, the way such information was used for profit, both monetary and political.

The government’s control of information was an extension of what the Narendra Modi government has attempted to do on many issues. To achieve this, the government not only found ways to reach out and persuade mainstream media to accept the official narrative but also centralised the source of information for the media. 

The strategy worked. For instance, mainstream media did not question the official figures put out by the government on the extent of the spread of the infection or the death toll. Official claims were exposed as gross underestimations when images of half-submerged corpses on the banks of the Ganga appeared, along with stories by independent media. Despite this, the government continues to claim that the death toll was lower than estimated by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and other international bodies.

Similarly, in the initial days after the sudden lockdown declared by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 23 March, the government was in denial about the impact on ordinary people. This was exemplified by the mass exodus of migrant workers from the cities. Those images of workers walking, crammed into trains and buses, and finding any means of transportation remain seared in our memories, thanks to photographs, real-life accounts, and films.

Despite this, as Philipose reports, the government remained in denial. Even when the photograph of an infant trying to wake up his dead mother went viral, the Press Information Bureau did a “fact check” claiming that the woman had died due to pre-existing health issues.

The lowest point in media coverage must surely be the way it reported on the meeting of the Tablighi Jamaat in New Delhi.

Meanwhile, the Solicitor General of India told the Supreme Court that on 30 March—a day when roads, trains, buses, and all forms of transport were bursting with people rushing back to their villages—not a single migrant worker was on the road. He also claimed the government was providing food and shelter to “about 23 lakh people”. Incidentally, the same Solicitor General referred to journalists as “prophets of doom” and “vultures” when the government approached the Supreme Court to pass an order preventing media from publishing any news about the pandemic without first clearing it with the government.

The lowest point in media coverage must surely be the way it reported on the meeting of the Tablighi Jamaat in New Delhi. Philipose, as well as Vikas Pathak in a separate essay, document how the false narrative that the virus was spread by followers of the Jamaat was amplified by mainstream media. As Philipose rightly points out, people fell for this misinformation partly because they did not understand the way the virus spread, but also because “communal forces were able to exploit fear, ignorance, and pre-existing prejudices to scapegoat an entire community”.

Another important essay is by retired Madras High Court judge, Justice K. Chandru. He lays out the ways in which the government used laws such as the Epidemic Diseases Act of 1897, passed in colonial times to deal with the bubonic plague in Bombay.

Writing specifically about Tamil Nadu, Justice Chandru notes how the state government added Covid-19 to the list of notified diseases recognised by the Public Health Act. Under this law, public health officers could act to control the disease and set up a system whereby public hospitals and local authorities would come under a single authority. Private hospitals and medical practitioners could also be brought in by the state government.

Implementation of this system was affected by the suddenness of the lockdown. It gave the police powers to stop movement of vehicles and people. In just four months after the lockdown, he notes, the police had booked 5.6 lakh traffic violations.

Such powers with the police also resulted in violence against the poor, especially migrant workers fleeing cities, or daily wage earners who had no option but to venture out.

Justice Chandru also notes the impact of the lockdown on the functioning of the courts. He writes, “The courts became virtual arbitrators of disputes between the beneficiaries and the government. Judges started advising the government on how to better manage the unfolding situation.”

An important reminder in Justice Chandru’s essay is on how state governments used the pandemic to tighten labour laws when “hundreds of thousands of people were losing jobs owing to the closure of commercial enterprises”. When 10 central labour unions drew the attention of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) to this, the government backtracked. He also draws our attention to the inadequacies in the Inter-State Migrant Workers Act of 1979 in the face of the pandemic’s impact on migrant workers.

One wishes that there had been a chapter looking at India’s public healthcare system and how and why it virtually fell apart during the pandemic.

While there has been a good deal written on the scientific and medical aspects of the pandemic, it is still something that needs constant reminders and reiterations. The misinformation spread during those years has not vanished and is bound to resurface if another global health crisis appears.

In this collection, T.V. Venkateswaran, a science writer and founder editor of India Science Wire, does a competent compilation of the journey of Covid-19 from China’s Wuhan district to the rest of the world. His essay was written in 2020, when the pandemic had just begun. As we know, the spread of the virus continued unabated and turned more virulent. Although he touches on the vaccines, the writer does not elaborate on the controversy surrounding them. Still, in a short chapter, he has assembled the credible information that emerged about the virus—a handy reference for anyone wanting to pursue this further.

One wishes that there had been a chapter looking at India’s public healthcare system and how and why it virtually fell apart during the pandemic. This meant that the majority, who cannot afford private health care, had to scramble for help, or just quietly give in to the disease, unattended and uncounted. The increasing privatisation of health care is a concern when a country where many people are poor must grapple with a health emergency like the Covid-19 pandemic.

The three long years when the pandemic tore through India ought to have prompted a closer look at the inadequacies of our health care system, an acknowledgement of the extensive costs of unthinking and unplanned responses of the government—such as the sudden and arbitrary lockdown—and the dangers of official and unofficial policies that target one community at times of such distress.

None of this has happened. Instead, “lockdown” has now been incorporated into all our languages. This became evident when the US and Israel-led war on Iran began on 28 February 2026. Within days, rumours of a “lockdown” led to an exodus—albeit smaller—of migrant workers from our cities.

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.

Media takeaways from 2021: What the government wants you to remember, and what it doesn’t

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on December 23, 2021

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/12/23/media-takeaways-from-2021-what-the-government-wants-you-to-remember-and-what-it-doesnt

 

As 2021 winds down, there are images that remain seared in our collective memories of this year.

Most vivid, and eviscerating, are those of funeral pyres and half-buried bodies on the banks of the Ganga as the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic raged through the country, killing in its wake lakhs of people. Many died unattended as hospitals ran out of oxygen. Others were not even counted as Covid deaths because they never made it to a hospital in time. Of those who succumbed to the virus, some got decent burials and cremations; others were left on the banks of rivers.

The photographers who captured these visuals need to be recognised and thanked. For these images cannot be wished away however hard the government might try and make us forget. Let us remember especially Danish Siddiqui, the brave Reuters photojournalist who was killed by the Taliban in Afghanistan in July. His photographs of the pandemic remain an unforgettable record of those terrible months.

Of course, if the Modi government had its way, the defining image of 2021 would be that of the prime minister inaugurating the Kashi Vishwanath Dham corridor on December 13. For two days, television channels gave wall-to-wall coverage of Modi carrying out Hindu religious rituals in a highly choreographed event. Not a word of scepticism appeared in the media as every move of the PM was recorded, often with breathless reverence.

While we have come to expect nothing less from Indian television channels, one had hoped that at least the print media would show a little more balance. Yet, in newspaper after newspaper, we were greeted first with the gaudy full-page advertisements issued by the UP government, predictably with the mug shots of both the PM and the UP chief minister, followed by the real page one (relegated to page five) with the same photographs of the Kashi Vishwanath Dham corridor.

There had already been a build up to the event by way of articles such as this in Fortune India calling the corridor “The Highway to Heaven”. We know how much was spent on the project, an estimated Rs 399 crore of taxpayers' money. But the question that must also be asked is how much was spent on the publicity leading up to its inauguration given that many newspapers carried full-page advertisements on the day of the inauguration.

Only a couple of newspapers gave us another side of the story, the unhappiness of the people whose land was forcibly acquired, such as this story. But such reports were drowned out by the adulatory tone of most of the reports in print and on TV.

As if this was not enough, barely a week later, the foundation stone for a road was laid in UP, once again by the prime minister. This time too the UP government took either the front page, or a couple of pages inside, in several leading newspapers. The ads boasted of the state government's achievements even though the announcement was about a road yet to be constructed.

The UP government advertisement story is best illustrated by its full-page ads announcing the foundation stone laying of a new airport at Jewar, Noida, by the prime minister. There were claims that it would be the biggest airport in the region with a capacity to handle seven crore passengers annually. That apparently is untrue as there are already seven airports in Asia with that capacity.

What is more, the image used to announce the new airport was that of Beijing's Daxing airport, called out once again on social media and by fact-check sites. If the UP government is spending so much money on ads, how is it that it doesn't have the competence to create advertisements that cannot be called out so easily? In fact, these ads are a good case for the Advertising Standards Council of India, which looks into complaints about advertising making wrong claims, to take up.

Apart from the look and content of such ads, there is another dimension that needs to be addressed about this sudden upsurge in government advertising in print media.

In the last year in particular, regular readers of print would have noticed the absence of consumer goods advertisements. In cities like Mumbai, for years the front pages of several newspapers displayed ads by builders advertising luxury apartments affordable to only a minuscule minority in this richest Indian city. Such ads are rarely seen today. Instead, the majority of the big ads in major newspapers are from governments, both central and state.

Those of us who have spent our entire journalistic careers in print media know of the influence that private sector advertisers had on content. From the 1990s, when the economic boom also led to more consumer goods advertising in print, it was not unknown for a representative of a multinational or a private corporation speaking directly to the owners of a newspaper if the company came across critical reports, or stories sympathetic to workers and their unions. The owners/editors would more often than not oblige by either removing such news or toning it down. Advertising was essential. It paid everyone's salaries, and brought in profits.

Much of that has changed now with the downturn in the economy. These companies wield less influence because they do not have the funds to release ads in newspapers. Also, their advertising budgets are focused on television, which has a much larger reach than print.

As a result, newspapers are in trouble. You can see it in the diminished number of pages each day when you get your favourite newspaper in the morning. And it is evident in the growing dependence on government ads.

If any of these governments were to decide that the particular newspaper was writing too much critical stuff, they could easily pull back their ads. The message would be clear. No newspaper, even the best resourced, can turn down government advertising today.

If this trend continues, we might just see the withering away of print media in India. Already many multi-edition newspapers have cut down on editions. Several magazines have stopped print editions and are only online.

Would the diminishing of print media be a blow to the media in India? Perhaps not, given that the majority of people access news through television and increasingly on digital platforms.

Yet we forget, as Aakar Patel points out in his book Price of the Modi Years, the biggest resource newspapers have is the beat reporter, a person who has feet on the ground and is able to get information that would otherwise remain unrecorded. During these Covid times, such reporters have been invaluable in documenting the full story of what was happening. Digital platforms like Scroll and Newslaundry have had to raise funds to assign people to do this kind of coverage that would be routinely done by newspapers. No independent digital platform can afford to hire the number of reporters needed to do extensive news coverage.

The importance of such reporting is self-evident. Without it, we would be left with government propaganda on the one hand, and the barrage of opinion and noise that has come to represent primetime news on television, on the other.

As we look ahead to 2022, is it inevitable that the only source of revenue that even the bigger newspapers can count on is government advertising? If that is the case, can we then say goodbye to the few spaces remaining for critical writing and investigative reporting?

It is a grim thought but one that must be noted. Today, it is some print and digital platforms that are still able to do what the media ought to be doing in a democracy. If these spaces were to be flattened or curtailed, it would be impossible to describe the media in India as independent and free.

 

From climate change to healthcare: Why is there no space for these issues in Big Media?

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on September 3, 2021

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/09/03/from-climate-change-to-healthcare-why-is-there-no-space-for-these-issues-in-big-media

So, "the longest war", as the US media insists on calling their country's engagement in Afghanistan, has ended. But is this really the end of the story? And has war and conflict really ended in a country ravaged by both for decades?

As you scroll through the extensive coverage in the international media leading up to the American withdrawal, there is next to nothing about another war that Afghanistan has been facing well before the takeover by the Taliban.

Of course, the repatriation of Afghans wanting to move out of the country will continue to engage the international media and, to some extent, what happens to women's education and employment. But alongside this is the humanitarian crisis that has been unfolding in the country even before the Taliban took over on August 15. How will Afghanistan's economy, so heavily dependent on foreign aid, survive? Who will be hit the hardest by this drastic downturn?

Apart from the economic crisis, according to this Reuters report, Afghanistan has been reeling under a severe drought. An estimated 12 million people, out of a population of 36 million, are facing “a food security crisis of not knowing when or where their next meal will come from”. This is in addition to rising food costs across the country. So, irrespective of the political developments or the kind of government that is eventually formed or whether it is recognised by the world, the harsh reality facing millions of Afghans will be finding food for their next meal.

The healthcare system in the country is also close to collapse. A representative of Médecins Sans Frontières is quoted in this report saying: “The overall health system in Afghanistan is understaffed, under-equipped and underfunded, for years. And the great risk is that this underfunding will continue over time.” As a result, the existing health facilities are already running short of supplies, even in the cities. One can imagine how much more dire the situation must be in the rural areas.

With the media restricted, will we ever know the suffering of ordinary Afghans who live away from the cities? According to Reporters Without Borders, less than 100 of the 700 women journalists in Kabul are still working. “Women journalists are in the process of disappearing from the capital,” it notes as many Afghan journalists, women and men, are leaving the country. At the same time, the international media have drastically reduced their presence. So, who will write these stories?

It is perhaps inevitable that geopolitics and speculation about what the Taliban will do will continue to dominate the news. This is, in any case, a given in most countries, including in India. Here, political news and government pronouncements hog news space while reports about drought, floods, hunger, and environmental crises are barely reported, if at all.

For instance, even as newspapers were spilling over with advertisements and sage pronouncements about “India at 75”, marking the beginning of India's 75th year of independence, an estimated 2.25 lakh people in 15 districts in Assam were affected by floods. Just going by numbers affected, this is newsworthy. And even if floods are an annual occurrence, in the past, such natural disasters would be reported and featured in the "national" pages of newspapers. Today, you have to work hard to find such news except in the newspapers of that region.

Then take healthcare. One of the positive outcomes of the Covid-19 pandemic has been that health coverage in the media has been given importance. In the past, reporters assigned the health beat scarcely got any recognition. Today, many of them, the majority of them being women journalists, are names we recognise for the excellent and persistent coverage they have done of the pandemic.

But there are other diseases too that afflict and kill Indians at all times. Many of these diseases, such as malaria, dengue and encephalitis, are closely linked with the appalling sanitary conditions in which millions of people live in cities and villages. The boastful advertisements and statements about the success of campaigns like Swachh Bharat, etc have failed miserably to make a dent on innumerable fetid open drains and sewers around which poor communities live because they have no option to move elsewhere. These are the people who struggle each monsoon with vector-borne diseases, and the poor state of our health infrastructure makes their lives even more precarious.

This distressing report in Newslaundry of an apparent “mystery illness” that has already killed 34 children in Firozabad, Uttar Pradesh, is just one of similar reports you can find in the media if you look hard enough. The media's neglect of these stories compounds the crisis as governments, like that of Yogi Adityanath in UP, can get away with boasting about what a superb job they are doing in looking after the health of people living in their states.

Then take another perennial, the impact of global warming. This is drawing considerable attention worldwide, partly due to the increase in forest fires in Europe and the US, as also flash floods and now hurricanes. The environmentalist Bill McKibben, who has been writing and campaigning on the links between global warming and the continuing burning of fossil fuels with extreme climate events, reiterates yet again in a piece in the New Yorker that the latest hurricane to land on the shores of the US is the result of simple physics. No one can put it better than he does when he writes:

“Hurricanes...draw their power from heat in the ocean. If there’s more heat, the hurricane can get stronger. Physics. Warm air can hold more water than cold air can. So in warm, arid areas you get more evaporation, and hence more drought, and hence more fire. Physics. The water that’s been evaporated into the atmosphere comes down: more flooding rainfall. Physics. The earth runs on energy. We’re trapping more of it near the planet’s surface because of the carbon dioxide that comes from burning coal and gas and oil. That energy expresses itself in melting ice sheets, in rising seas, in the incomprehensible roar of the wind as a giant storm crashes into a city of steel and glass. It’s not, in the end, all that complicated.”

But in India, our coverage of the impact of climate change remains sporadic. In Mumbai, for instance, the municipal commissioner is quoted as saying that 80 percent of Mumbai's Nariman Point (a business district), and Mantralaya (seat of the state government) will be underwater by 2050. He was speaking at the launch of the Mumbai Climate Action Plan website. He also said that in the last 15 months, Mumbai had been hit by three cyclones.

Yet, the city's municipal corporation that he heads is hell-bent on building a coastal road that will increase fossil-fuel guzzling privatised transport, benefit only a small percentage of the population, and add to the city's existing burden of air pollution besides contributing to global warming. There has been practically no discussion in local media questioning the municipal commissioner or debating how India's financial capital will survive if large parts are submerged in just 30 years.

Apart from the impact of global warming, a report by the University of Chicago's Air Quality Life Index finds that India is the most polluted country in the world. Air pollution, it states, could cut life expectancy by nine years in north India and 2.5 years in Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. While organisations dedicated to environmental issues like the Centre for Science and Environment have been campaigning for action, mainstream media also needs to find ways to illustrate how this will affect the lives of people, particularly the poorest and most marginalised. Without that, there is little hope of policy makers feeling any kind of pressure to take action.

Even if subjects like climate change, pollution, health care, sanitation, and nutrition don't grab headlines, they affect the survival of millions of people. And just on those grounds, they are “newsworthy”.

Unfortunately, given the nature of the dominant media India, namely television news, the concept of what constitutes news has been so distorted that not just the subjects that I've mentioned, but entire regions and populations of this country, are being permanently obscured. Unlike in Afghanistan, there are plenty of journalists in India who can cover these stories. But the space for them to report on these issues is shrinking by the day.

Should Indian media constantly call out the powerful for peddling falsehoods?

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on June 24, 2021

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/06/24/should-indian-media-constantly-call-out-the-powerful-for-peddling-falsehoods

How does a half-truth or an outright lie become a "fact"? When it is uttered by a politician or a celebrity and amplified unquestioningly by the media.

That is one of many challenges facing India's media. How often should you call out the powerful when what they are saying is patently untrue?

The media in the United States did not spend much time debating this when they regularly fact-checked every utterance of former president Donald Trump, who had a habit of being rather liberal with facts. Leading newspapers and TV channels regularly ran fact-checks to inform readers and viewers of the exaggerations and lies that were routinely mouthed by their president even as they had to report what he said. In some instances, television networks chose to stop live relays of his speech when what he said was particularly problematic during the height of the coronavirus pandemic.

We have not seen the media doing this in India. The pronouncements of the powerful are routinely telecast or reproduced in print. The next day, an opposition politician might point out that what was said was untrue. If that is reported at all, it will pass without notice. Or an expert could write an article on the edit page contradicting the politician. This again would be read only by the converted, so to speak. Thus, what lives on in public memory is what the powerful person has said.

Does fact-checking the public pronouncements of the powerful even matter?

According to Prof Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University and author of the recently released 2021 Reuters Institute Digital News Report, many Indians thought that much of the misinformation about the pandemic often came from the top. In an edit page piece in the Hindu, he writes, "Study after study around the world has found such 'network propaganda', where misinformation is spread by some top politicians, nakedly partisan news media who cheer them on, and well-organised communities of political supporters active on social media and messaging applications."

Nielsen's advice to the Indian authorities if they want to check misinformation is to " take a cue from the fact that much of the Indian public clearly recognise that misinformation often comes from the top", and "spend less time worrying about activists, journalists, and Twitter".

Indians already paid a heavy price for believing the messages that "come from the top" earlier this year when we were told that the coronavirus crisis was behind us. The media ought to have been more vigilant and could have amplified the voices of those advocating caution and pointing out that even countries with good healthcare infrastructure in the West had been hit by a second and even a third wave of the pandemic. Given the poor state of India's health infrastructure, there was simply no place for the message of Indian exceptionalism that was being propagated.

The impact of the second wave was horrific and sudden only because the warning signs were not heeded. For the media, the story was so stark that it could not be ignored. From the oxygen crisis in Delhi to the half-buried corpses along the Ganga, no self-respecting media house could look the other way and ignore what was going on. As the editors of Dainik Bhaskar, one of the largest Indian newspapers, told Newslaundry, you had to report what you saw.

The paper's Gujarati edition, Divya Bhaskar, was one of the first to track the discrepancy between the official death toll and what its reporters saw on the ground. Since then, apart from Dainik Bhaskar, several mainstream English language papers such as the Hindu have been doing the data crunching to put forward the real number of deaths. Experts and biostatisticians had been predicting that the real numbers would be at least 10 lakh and not the 3.9 lakh officially acknowledged by the government. The persistent stories in different media have not just reiterated these projections, they suggest the total could be even higher.

Yet, there has been no acknowledgment so far from the different state governments, or the central government, that the death data needs drastic revision.

The Reuters Institute report focuses on misinformation with regard to the pandemic. But in the last month, we have seen other forms of misinformation such as about India's vaccination policy. We still have to estimate how much the union government's constantly changing vaccination policy has cost the country in terms of avoiding hospitalizations and deaths and also contributing to vaccine hesitancy.

We are constantly being told that this government has been exceptional in its vaccination policy and if there have been hurdles they have been placed by the obduracy and unreasonable demands of the opposition-ruled states.

We are also told by none other than the prime minister that this is the first time India is producing vaccines. On June 7, in his televised address to the nation, Narendra Modi said, “If you look at the history of vaccinations in India, whether it was a vaccine for smallpox, hepatitis B or polio, you will see that India would have to wait decades for procuring vaccines from abroad. When vaccination programmes ended in other countries, it wouldn't have even begun in our country.”

Is this true? As Jacob Koshy politely points out in the Hindu, this view of India's vaccination policy is "at odds with the facts”. He goes on to list the smallpox vaccine and the polio vaccine as examples of how India manufactured vaccines even before Independence.

That is not all. In his speech, Modi also said that since 2014, that is, since his party came to power and he became the prime minister, under the Indradhanush programme launched by his government, the percentage of children being vaccinated had increased from 60 percent to 90 percent. Yet, this too flies in the face of facts as according to the latest National Family Health Survey, none of the 17 states and five union territories surveyed had touched 90 percent in child vaccination. In fact, reports Koshy, only five states – Himachal Pradesh, West Bengal, Karnataka, Goa and Sikkim – exceeded 80 percent and only Himachal Pradesh touched 89 percent.

Why should this embroidering of history and facts matter? Because if they are not called out, this is what millions of Indians will believe, that only now is India "atmanirbhar", is producing vaccines indigenously and that the current government has given a boost to routine vaccinations too.

All this then flows seamlessly onto June 21, when India is supposed to have broken a "world record" in vaccinating over 86 lakh people in a day. Actually even this so-called "fact" is not true. But the reality of how this even happened is what makes the apparent achievement that the government boasted about more interesting.

For even as various ministers were busy crediting the prime minister and thanking him profusely for this achievement, the story of how it came about was already unravelling in the media. Supriya Sharma in Scroll exposed how the vaccination numbers were noticeably low in the states that hit a high mark on June 21 and that most of these states were ruled by the BJP. For instance, on June 20, Madhya Pradesh had vaccinated only 692 persons. Yet on June 21, it administered 16.9 lakh doses only to sink back to under 5,000 the very next day.

Although initially most mainstream newspapers ran uncritical frontpage stories on this “achievement”, in the days that followed many of them, including the Hindu and the Times of India, were more sceptical. They ran the data of the vaccine shots administered in the days before and after June 21. The figures spoke louder than words: the one-day miracle was only possible because stocks had been hoarded in previous weeks in some states.

The media also pointed out the huge discrepancy between the availability of vaccines, which will not exceed 40 lakh even if the Indian manufacturers operate at maximum capacity, and the requirement to maintain a daily target of 80 lakh or more. Where is the rest of the supply coming from? The government has yet to answer that question.

Then there is the myth of the "free vaccines". Unless constantly reminded, people forget that all vaccines have been free in India, from the smallpox one to BCG to polio. So providing Covid vaccines free to Indians is neither new nor an exceptional achievement of this government.

The reason such fact-checking is even noticed today is because it did not take place sufficiently in the past, and particularly over the last seven years. This has contributed to myth building, to the belief of one leader being not just invincible but also infallible. This myth has helped him and his party ride through multiple mistakes and bad policies that have placed such an enormous economic burden on Indians, especially the poor, apart from mismanaging the ongoing pandemic.

Calling out those who get free airtime merely because they are in power is the duty of a free press. It cannot be otherwise.

Riverside graves of the Covid dead tell a story of the media’s failure

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on May 27, 2021

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/05/27/riverside-graves-of-the-covid-dead-tell-a-story-of-the-medias-failure

The defining image of this second wave of the pandemic in India has now become the hundreds of shallow graves along the Ganga and other rivers, replacing the searing images of burning pyres. These graves are a stark reminder not just of the discrepancy in death data between the official and the actual, but they also hint at a deeper distress in rural India that has been obscured from our view.

We have to be grateful that there are journalists who continue to doggedly pursue this sad and disturbing story of unaccounted deaths. From journalists going around in a car, filming these graves and recording what people have to say, such as Barkha Dutt, to mainstream regional media outlets like Divya Bhaskar and Sandesh in Gujarat refusing to obfuscate and telling the story as it is, to young women journalists like Shivangi Saxena and Akanksha Kumar from Newslaundry, such documentation will form an essential part of the history of these terrible years. Without this, there would have been a veil of disinformation pulled over the eyes of citizens. And false narratives, so beloved of this government, regularly amplified by the media groups beholden to it. And Uttar Pradesh chief minister Adityanath, who continues to maintain that all is well in his state where these shallow graves abound, would not have been called out.

Try as it might, the government simply has no place to hide now as journalists, experts and the international media continue to focus on the discrepancies in the data on deaths and incidence of disease. The latest of these is a data presentation by the New York Times that asks, "Just How Big Could India’s True Covid Toll Be?" Its conservative estimate is that there have been six lakh deaths from Covid but says the more likely number is 16 lakh. The official figure on May 24 was three lakh deaths. That is the extent of the discrepancy.

Indian newspapers have also been writing about this, with Chinmay Tumbe, author of The Age of Pandemics, looking closely at Gujarat's data in the Indian Express and Rukmini S writing about Chennai in the Hindu. Tumbe concludes that "even the most conservative extrapolations from the available excess mortality data take the all-India death toll of the second wave to over a million”. In sum, all these articles are saying the same thing, that both the extent of the spread of the virus and the deaths resulting from it are far in excess of what is revealed by government data.

Even if we were to assume that this is not being done deliberately, in the face of growing evidence, one would have expected a word of acknowledgment from officials that something has gone wrong and needs to be corrected. Instead, there is silence. Or efforts to divert the conversation elsewhere, to "positivity", which in the current context is just another term for denial.

The fact remains that while some newspapers, digital platforms and a couple of TV news channels have focused on this data mismatch, much of mainstream Indian media is not highlighting these facts.

Perhaps Manoj Kumar Jha, the Rashtriya Janata Dal member of the Rajya Sabha, is wrong to brandish the entire Indian media in a scathing oped in the Indian Express when he writes that it has "asphyxiated democracy at a time when the breathless nation is struggling hard to save its loved ones”. Yet, it is difficult to argue against his reflection that "mainstream media houses shamefully defending the indefensible must remember that the annals of history shall be much more objective and ruthless in judging their role than the system to which they are plugged into for reasons known to everyone. They amplified the discourse of the failure of 'the system', giving much-needed leeway to those who have knowingly imperiled the lives and livelihoods of millions of people. Instead of identifying, highlighting specific governance failures, and seeking accountability, the mainstream media is following the command of the faces behind the system as they enjoin people to 'talk positivity', 'spread positivity', etc."

Besides the story about inaccurate data on Covid deaths, the saffron shrouds on those shallow graves are obscuring another story that we in the media need to be reporting. That of immense economic distress and hunger that is leading families to abandon their loved ones in these shallow graves rather than conducting the ritual cremation. It is not difficult to imagine the extent of poverty and desperation if people cannot rustle up a few thousand rupees to buy wood and pay a priest to conduct the ritual.

A hint of this distress is coming through in some reports. But while economists will analyse the reasons for this continuing economic distress, it is for journalists to put a name and a face to it.

Last year, the migrant exodus gave us many faces to remember of the millions of people who subsist at the margins in this country. It was a story that was in your face; it could not be ignored.

This time around, there is no drama of that kind. Yet it is dramatic in its own way because it tells us that a year down the line, millions of families are broken, with no hope of finding a source of income, and little by way of government assistance to tide them over. Compounding this is their continuing invisibility in mainstream media reporting.

This story by Supriya Sharma in Scroll, for instance, paints a grim picture of what urban migrants are facing at this time in our big cities.

She writes, "If the lockdown last year came down as a hammer, this year, it feels like a thousand cuts. Obscured by the dramatic and distressing images of death in the second wave of the pandemic, a slow drip of distress is going unnoticed, not just by the government, but even by other citizens, leaving the urban poor to fend for themselves."

The migrants who left last year came back to the cities after their long trek home, only to be left high and dry once again. And this time, as Sharma records, civil society interventions appear more muted. I would argue that this has happened because their distress has been rendered invisible by the media. Without us digging out and amplifying this story, there is no hope for people living perennially on the margins to get either government aid or that from voluntary groups.

Sharma also reports on how even what the urban poor are entitled to, such as extra rations under different state and central programmes, is not available. To cover daily expenses, people are compelled to borrow money, probably at usurious rates, just to be able to buy provisions on the open market at much higher prices than they would have got if the ration shops had the supplies. The central government is failing not just on the vaccination front, it is also proving incompetent in executing the welfare programmes which have been in place for more than a year.

Anshu Gupta, founder of the organisation Goonj, also emphasises the crisis of hunger in this article in the Indian Express. He writes that last year the poor gained attention because the media reported on the exodus, but as soon as they reached their villages they were virtually forgotten. This time around, the crisis has focused on the medical emergency, on the need for oxygen and medicines. But the crisis of deepening hunger has been virtually overlooked by everyone, including the media.

Gupta writes, "It is important to understand that while the second wave is about health, it doesn’t mean that hunger is not an issue. The second wave is about ventilators and oxygen to keep people alive, but...for millions today, access to simple dal chawal is no lesser than access to oxygen.”

It is also more difficult to provide assistance this time around because with trains and buses still functioning, many migrants left voluntarily for their homes. We know now that part of the reason for the spread of the disease to rural areas was because the system of quarantining returning migrants last year was not implemented this time around. As a result, they brought back the infection. And given the dire economic crisis facing their families, there was no one around to help or record either infection or death.

This is the story those shallow graves are telling us, one that still needs to be reported.

For post-pandemic media, public health needs to be the biggest story

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on May 13, 2021

https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/05/13/for-post-pandemic-media-public-health-needs-to-be-the-biggest-story

From burning pyres and patients gasping for breath to bodies floating down the Ganga, India has been through another torrid fortnight. The whole world is now aware of the extent of the tragedy unfolding. Yet, our government continues to focus on fixing what it considers to be a "negative" narrative.

A fortnight back, when the focus of international and national media coverage was the desperate situation in New Delhi, where hospitals, private and public, were running out of oxygen and patients were dying not from the disease but from the absence of oxygen supply, we knew already that if we turned our gaze away from the cities, a much more tragic state-of-affairs was unfolding.

That is exactly what has happened. The second wave of the pandemic has inevitably, and predictably, spread to rural India and the devastation here is incalculable. This is so because there is little to no reporting, people are not being tested, not being treated when they finally reach a health facility, and dying not knowing that the "cough and fever" that afflicted them is the novel coronavirus that has already felled lakhs of other Indians.

The reports appearing in the media, mostly print and digital, remind us repeatedly that the Indian health system has not folded because of the pandemic; it was already broken. Although the sheer volume of cases has overwhelmed it even in better-served cities, in much of rural India and in small towns, the existing and abysmal health infrastructure that exists might as well not be there.

What journalists report gives us only a glimmer of the grim reality. Such as this report in the Indian Express by Amil Bhatnagar from Meerut in Uttar Pradesh. What he describes is not the situation in a remote hamlet but at the district headquarters: "A folding cot that a family claims to have got itself, fans that don’t work, a roof that is leaking at several places, and a ward overpowered by the stench of a toilet. As Meerut district climbs to the top of Covid charts in Uttar Pradesh, with 1,368 new cases taking its total active number to 13,941, its largest government coronavirus facility, Lala Lajpat Rai Memorial Medical College, is struggling to keep up."

The situation in UP has become the focus of much of the media attention. Understandably so, as despite chief minister Adityanath's threat to jail those who criticise the work of the state government, the reality cannot be hidden any more. Even members of his party are now publicly complaining about the dismal reality on the ground.

In Varanasi district, one of the four high-burden districts in the state, Jyoti Yadav from the Print reports that people are dying from "cough and fever" without realising it could be Covid because there is no testing. Her reports from Lucknow and Jaunpur tell a similar story. Every day new reports are chronicling the absence of health infrastructure and the price ordinary people are paying.

Most heartbreaking amongst these are the reports of over 700 schoolteachers who died because they had to do poll duty during the recently concluded panchayat elections in the state. This one in PARI, which gives us the full list of 540 men and 173 women teachers who died, is probably the most moving. It illustrates the utter callousness of a government more concerned about elections than the lives of its people, men and women who are also frontline workers.

And then you have hospitals that are built and widely publicised but add up to nothing. A report by Ayush Tiwari and Basant Kumar in Newslaundry describes how only 50 of the 150 oxygenated beds in a facility inaugurated with great fanfare by Baba Ramdev in Haridwar, Uttarakhand, are operational. They add: "There’s a shortage of doctors, ward boys and housekeeping staff, limiting the facility’s capacity and forcing it to refer patients elsewhere. The facility does not have proper water supply and Covid wards don’t have roofs, risking widespread transmission."

Remember Haridwar only recently hosted a "superspreader" event, the Kumbh Mela.

The situation in neighbouring Bihar is not much better. Pratyush Tripathy, writing in Scroll, illustrates with a set of maps the crisis that is waiting to explode in the state where there are no vacant ICU beds in 18 out of 38 districts. This, in a state that has the lowest Human Development Index in the country and "one doctor for 43,788 persons".

Meanwhile, the government itself has finally acknowledged that the situation in rural India is worrying with 533 districts in the country out of over 700 reporting a test positivity rate of over 10 percent. Dr Balram Bhargava, director general of the Indian Council of Medical Research, is quoted as saying, “India is facing a massive upsurge in Covid-19 cases. The national positivity rate is around 20-21 per cent, and about 42 per cent districts in the country are reporting a positivity rate more than the national average."

Just as the second wave of the pandemic had been predicted, this too should not come as a surprise. Yet, the government and its supporters continue to find ways to divert attention away from this tragic unfolding saga in rural India.

Their latest ploy is the creation of digital spaces that mimic well-known international newspapers' names, but have been specifically tasked to put forth the narrative that the government wants the world to hear. Thus, we have something called The Daily Guardian telling us how hard prime minister Narendra Modi is working to handle the pandemic, and The Australia Today accusing "vulture journalists" of spreading "more panic and despair than the pandemic".

Fortunately, or unfortunately, for the Modi government, neither the Indian nor the international media is persuaded by these deflection tactics. The stories are streaming in, from villages and small towns, and the picture they paint is not pretty. Neither can it be hidden. How long can a government go on denying this reality? How much of spin can it give when there are visuals of bodies floating down the very river it has promised to cleanse?

In fact, the government's response to the disturbing visuals of scores of corpses found floating down the Ganga and washing up in UP and Bihar illustrates its priorities. According to an ANI report, union Jal Shakti minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat reiterated, "The Modi government is committed to the cleanliness (of) 'mother' Ganga", even as he did not deny the reports about the bodies. Is that all the government is worried about, the "cleanliness" of the Ganga, at a time when in desperation people are abandoning their loved ones in the river because they cannot afford to cremate them?

The reports we have read over this last fortnight are just the tip of the iceberg. There are many more stories waiting to be told even as authorities fail to count, or even acknowledge, how many people are dying from the virus. Here, one has to once again commend the determination with which the Gujarati newspaper Sandesh has persisted in counting the dead in the state and reporting the mismatch between what it has found and the government's official figures.

This report in Newslaundry from Meerut district in UP also exposes the huge discrepancy between the bodies being cremated and the official figures. In fact, the questions about the death count simply refuse to go away and will continue to haunt state and central governments. Not just journalists, but even experts such as the mathematician Murad Banaji have raised repeated questions about the accuracy of the death count. Banaji suggests in this interview to Karan Thapar on the Wire that one million Indians have already died from the virus.

Apart from the pandemic, its spread to rural India ought to remind us that the story of the grossly inadequate health infrastructure is one that has always been there.

India's health system has not crumbled only because of the pandemic. It was barely adequate at the best of times, and in many parts of rural India virtually non-existent. Today, we are being compelled to notice this and acknowledge it because of the health emergency the country faces. But each year, these areas see many such emergencies in the form of other diseases such as dengue, malaria, and encephalitis as well as perennials such as tuberculosis. In states where there is chronic malnutrition and stunting amongst children, exacerbated by the absence of medical intervention, thousands of infants die every year from something that is easily treatable, diarrhoea.

When this crisis is over, although there is no sign of it at present, we must continue to focus on this failed health system in so many parts of India. The pandemic has shown us that gloating about being an "emerging" economy means nothing when people can die from the lack of oxygen during a pandemic, or the absence of clean water at other times.

If there is one lesson we in the media can learn from this terrible year it is that the focus on public health must remain a crucial and relevant part of coverage even in non-pandemic times. As epidemiologist Chandrakant Lahariya points out in the India Forum, India would be much better placed if the government fulfilled its promises of increasing health spending to 2.5 percent of the GDP and investing more in primary health care.

The media, I believe, can play an important role in creating pressure on this and future governments by refusing to take its eye off the state of our public health infrastructure.

Covid crisis: Why isn’t Big Media holding the government accountable?

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on April 15, 2021

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/04/15/covid-crisis-why-isnt-big-media-holding-the-government-accountable

 

I am writing this on a day when daily new coronavirus infections in India have touched two lakh. Perhaps after a year of having various numbers thrown at us, Indians are failing to grasp the gravity of the situation. But surely the responsibility for that lies with those whose job it is to convey the seriousness.

Instead, on one hand we are witnessing the daily surreal drama of these increasing numbers, and on the other visuals suggesting there is no pandemic as lakhs gather in Haridwar for the Kumbh Mela and thousands crowd election rallies in Bengal to listen to India's two most powerful men, the prime minister and the home minister.

There are few masks to be seen in Haridwar or Bengal and the only physical distance in the election rallies is between the highly excitable, mostly male crowd, stuck together in true Indian style, and the dignitaries on the raised stage.

This is not imagery that conveys the crisis facing India. Yet, although some in the media, and many more on social media, are asking questions, there are few expressions of anger or frustration in the public or in mainstream media.

In the United States, former president Donald Trump's election rallies last year where he openly showed disdain for wearing masks, were recognised as super-spreader events and the media didn’t hesitate to criticise him. But in India it seems our leaders exist in the stratosphere, untouched by this willful indifference towards a virus that is causing widespread suffering and death.

Readers will forgive me for this rant, but as a journalist one feels helpless and defeated when those who have the power to convey a credible message on the pandemic choose instead to demonstrate by example that they care more about winning a state election than the lives of citizens.

If the politicians do not speak, except to exhort ordinary citizens about how they must behave, it falls on the media to find ways to tell the full story of what’s going on. It is not easy, hampered as many media organisations are today by limited staff, having laid off hundreds of journalists last year. Yet it can and must be done.

This time last year, we were still in a national lockdown. Today, there is a sense of deja vu that so little has changed, that instead of moving forward we are slipping backwards.

In April 2020, the nature of the disease and how it had spread was still to be fully grasped. Today we know more of the science. We also have vaccines that can provide some protection, although not complete. And all this ought to make us not just more knowledgeable, but also better prepared.

And here when I use "us" I mean not just ordinary people, but especially those who make decisions, the people in government.

Unfortunately, the actions of the central government in the last several weeks have blown away all hopes that lessons were learnt in the last year.

From denial to obfuscation to a total callous disregard for the seriousness of the crisis, we have seen it all. And on top of it, we have witnessed petty politics over the allocation of vaccines while the country is literally burning (a sad metaphor when one looks at the crisis facing crematoria in Gujarat in the last week or so).

For the media, the second or third wave of the pandemic poses many more challenges than we faced last year. How do you keep telling the same story over and over again? How do you strike a balance between reporting credible information and being alarmist? How do you hold the government to account when even accurate data is not always available?

Fortunately, despite the pathetic state of our television news channels, there are still journalists who are doing the job they are tasked to do.

Take developments in the last couple of weeks. In Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat, the state governments seem to be in denial about the seriousness of the crisis facing their states even as the central government remains focused on Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh and Punjab, where there has been a steady rise in cases. The politics of this policy of side-stepping the former two states is rather obvious but we need not go there at present.

The relevant question for the media is how we can question and challenge official versions of the crisis such as the deaths due to Covid.

In Gujarat, the media must be commended for doing just this. According to a report by Aarefa Johari in Scroll, local newspapers and television channels have exposed the "staggering mismatch" between official figures and the reality. For instance, on April 12, in Ahmedabad the official figure of those dying from Covid was given as 20. Yet a leading Gujarati newspaper, Sandesh, said it had tracked 63 deaths by posting its journalists outside the morgue of the Ahmedabad Civil Hospital from midnight to 5 am on April 12.

If this was not bad enough, Gujarat chief minister Vijay Rupani put out patently wrong information about how Covid deaths are counted by claiming that Indian Council of Medical Research guidelines stipulated that only those whose primary cause of death was the virus were counted and not those with comorbidities where this would be the secondary cause. This is in fact the exact opposite of what the ICMR has stipulated. One wonders then how many other chief ministers in this country are misguided like Rupani and are, therefore, fudging Covid death data.

In Madhya Pradesh, the same story is being played out as exposed by NDTV. Journalists from the channel tracked the number of cremations and compared this with the official death data. On April 8, in Bhopal alone, 41 bodies were cremated following Covid protocols whereas the official figure was only 27 deaths for the entire state. A story in India Today reveals a similar picture. It is more than likely that this is the case in more than one state in India.

If this was not worrying enough, according to this article in Time magazine, for every one reported infection of Covid in India, there could be between 26 to 32 that have not been reported. This is based on a serological survey conducted between August and September 2020. And according to Ramanan Laxminarayan, director of the US-based Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy, who is quoted in the article, not only is there undercounting of those infected by a factor of 30, there is likely an undercounting of deaths as well. "For 80 percent of deaths, we have no medically identified cause of death at any given time,” he says.

Then take the question of mutations. Here again, there is science but also official obfuscation. The science is working at establishing the exact nature of the mutant strain or strains that are spreading. Instead of encouraging information on this to be made public, so that people are aware of the seriousness of the situation, the government has attempted to hide it or downplay it as this article in Scroll points out. One of the reasons attributed for the dramatic surge in Maharashtra is the "double mutant" that was first detected in the state. It has now been detected in 10 other states.

Today in India, we are facing not just a dramatic and troubling surge in infections and deaths due to Covid but a crisis of credibility as far as governments are concerned, both at the Centre and in the states. The principal reason for this is their inability to give out credible, science-based information to a public that’s drained and exhausted after more than a year of the pandemic.

Perhaps this tweet from Brahmar Mukherjee best sums up the current state of affairs:

For us in the media, possibly the most significant lesson from this last year is the importance of public health reporting. Let me emphasise “public”. Reporting on health had deteriorated in the corporate media to stories on lifestyle diseases, on new medical technologies and on high-profile medical personnel.

Public health reporting requires an understanding not just of health infrastructure and what is lacking therein, but also constant tracking of the less glamorous diseases, many of which are perennial such as tuberculosis. It is this kind of reporting that prepares journalists for health emergencies, such as the one we are facing today.

Unfortunately, given the financial cutbacks in the media over this last year, few major news organisations are willing to invest in this kind of journalism. Yet we know now that the Covid pandemic is not the last such crisis we will face.

This is as good a time as any to train a generation of journalists who will understand the science and the politics of health emergencies and provide the public with credible information.

 

 

It’s election season and Indian media has put on blinkers. As usual

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on April 1, 2021

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/04/01/its-election-season-and-indian-media-has-put-on-blinkers-as-usual

 

In the polarised times in which we live in India, every election has become, literally, a do or die battle. The “Battle of Nandigram” is only one of the many warlike headlines that accost us each day as the long-drawn out process of elections to four state assemblies and one union territory proceeds. But is that the only story in town?

The pandemic has crept back into the headlines with a spurt of fresh coronavirus infections, and the very real worry that India is now facing a second wave. This ought to be headline news. But the media should also be asking why this has happened, how much of it is a failure of policy and how much of the blame lies with the public.

For one, how is it that the government has permitted large gatherings of Hindu pilgrims and the recent Holi celebrations, yet, when asked, officials blame ordinary people for not observing Covid protocols.

And what about the gatherings during the ongoing elections? Visuals clearly indicate that masks aren’t being used as thousands crowd together at rallies and smaller meetings. Has any political party tried to emphasise to its followers the importance of observing these minimum precautions to prevent the spread of the disease? No official, or politician, is willing to admit that there has been a failure of leadership and absence of clear messaging. Instead, we keep hearing them talk about how ordinary people are undisciplined. And the media, unfortunately, is not asking the tough questions that need to be asked at this time.

Apart from elections and the pandemic, what are the stories that need to be told but are barely reported?

We need to tear our eyes away from TV screens and the endless election coverage to think of what is happening in Myanmar, a country with which India has historical ties. The people's resistance to the military regime that took over the country on February 1 has been one of the top stories in the international press. Yet, in India, although stories from international newspapers are routinely reproduced, the democratic struggle now underway in Myanmar – which has already taken many lives – hasn’t found much space in our media.

Myanmar shares a 1,643-km border with India that touches four Northeastern states – Mizoram, Manipur, Nagaland, and Arunachal Pradesh. This reality dawned once there were reports that people from Myanmar had crossed into Mizoram, seeking refuge from the daily confrontations between the protesting citizens and the military.

Mizoram’s chief minister, Zoramthanga, has urged the central government to allow the refugees to enter, emphasising the "humanitarian crisis" as well as the shared ancestry with people on the other side.

While Mizoram has taken a sympathetic stance towards the refugees, the Manipur government issued a circular that stated, “People trying to enter/seek refuge should be politely turned away.” Fortunately, the circular has now been withdrawn. Yet in both states, the future of these refugees remains uncertain given that India does not have a refugee policy.

The lack of reporting on this crisis on our borders is emblematic of the neglect of reporting on the Northeast in mainstream media, or "mainland" media, as people in the Northeast call it. The region has remained in the periphery of consciousness in most of India, only springing into the spotlight when there is a natural disaster, an act of insurgency, or an election. Even the latter is covered spottily unless a mainstream Indian political party is central to it. Thus, Assam gets much more coverage than the hill states of the Northeast.

The news that refugees from neighbouring Myanmar were walking across the porous international border into Mizoram would have surprised most readers who are unaware of the history and the geography of much of the Northeast. They would not have known that the border exists on paper but that, in fact, there has been free movement and interaction between people living on either side who are, often, from the same ethnic group.

On market day in the village of Longwa in Nagaland's Mon district, I observed this fluidity as people I spoke to said they had walked across from the other side to shop. The house of the village headman, the Angh, straddles the line that officially divides the two countries. There is a check post at the top of the hill but no one checks. This is a lived reality in just one of several such villages stretching across from Arunachal Pradesh to Nagaland, Manipur, and Mizoram.

The story about the welcome that the government of Mizoram and its people want to extend to the refugees from Myanmar gives us an essential insight into that state. The fact that even this story is being barely reported illustrates the continuing indifference of mainstream media and people in India towards this region. It is this absence of reporting that reinforces ignorance and prejudice, the price for which has been paid by the thousands of Northeasterners who study and work across India but are constantly asked to prove that they are Indian.

As always, there are exceptions to the rule: these stories by Krishn Kaushik who reported from Mizoram, for example. Not only do we learn about the trickle of people crossing over but also the reason Mizos believe they ought to be helped.

The other story is the absence of a gender perspective in reporting, something I pointed out in my last column with reference to the coverage of the migrant exodus of last year. Here I must commend the Indian Express as the only mainstream newspaper that not only did a two-part feature looking at the impact of the pandemic on women's jobs (read here and here), but also reiterated the points in these articles in an editorial. Furthermore, both stories were carried on the front page.

In the digital version of print media, the importance of this isn’t apparent. But traditionally, newspaper editors make a conscious choice each day when they choose the stories they want to place on the front page. These are carried "above the fold" as broadsheet newspapers are folded when they are sold and distributed. An important story is placed just below the masthead of the paper. Both these reports were given that position.

Also, when editors want to emphasise certain stories, they write editorials around them. Although not many people read editorials, they are an indicator of the importance a paper gives to an issue. Hence the significance of an editorial on the gender crisis in the Indian Express.

The gender issue remains relevant in the light of the latest global ranking by the World Economic Forum. India has slipped 28 places in the gender gap and now stands at 140 out of 156 countries surveyed, as this story points out. Its neighbours in South Asia, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Myanmar, and Bhutan are ranked higher.

There is, of course, a gender angle in election coverage too, and not just because India's only woman chief minister, Mamata Banerjee, is at the centre of the story of the Bengal election. She has had to face many crude remarks made by her opponents that essentialise her being a woman.

Misogyny surfaces constantly during election campaigns, and it has this time too. Some of it is called out; much of it goes by without comment. I leave you with this story by Kavitha Muralidharan about the rampant sexist rhetoric in Tamil Nadu before and during this election. A salutary outcome of sexism being called out is the Election Commission’s decision to bar A Raja of the DMK from campaigning for 48 hours.