All India Reporters

[Darth Gupta]

ThroughApril and May, government figures of COVID-19 deaths and infections were suspiciously low from the populous Indian state of Gujarat, north of Mumbai. The reported numbers were sometimes as low as in the single digits in major cities, even as local hospitals and crematoria were overflowing. Like most reporters, Yogen Joshi, a senior journalist in the city of Baroda, with the Gujarati newspaper Gujarat Samachar, knew the official data was unreliable.

Journalists have shown remarkable perseverance and bravery through the pandemic, finding ways to tell stories in the absence of accurate official data: from counting dead bodies to tracking last rites to highlighting mismatched statistics from different government authorities.

In Ahmedabad, the largest city in Gujarat, a team of reporters from local daily Sandesh spent a night in April driving to 21 crematoria to see how many bodies were being cremated under COVID-19 protocols. Where the state government had claimed 25 deaths on a particular day, the reporters found more than 200 in Hindu funeral homes alone. Another team of reporters from the same paper spent 17 hours outside a government COVID-19 hospital wing counting the number of corpses. On April 13, the paper reported that, in just one hospital, its reporters counted 64 deaths. The government figure for Ahmedabad that day: 20.

Government data has itself been inconsistent. Sandesh, for instance, reported how district-level data differed from state-level data, both of which fell short of the numbers the paper tallied. Extracting death records was another way of exposing the truth. Both Divya Bhaskar, a Gujarati daily, and Amar Ujala, a Hindi paper published in six states, investigated the difference between death certificates issued over the same period this year and last year in a particular area.

Earlier this month, the Indian government recorded nearly 23 million cases and more than 240,000 deaths ー though the real human toll may be much higher, according to experts. Scientists believe that a variant called B.1.617, recently classified by the WHO as a global concern, has been responsible for the dramatic increase of infections in the country of 1.4 billion people.

With New Delhi in lockdown, for Sarin and other reporters, the sound of ambulance sirens outside has replaced the hustle and bustle of the newsroom. In some cases, daily calls to sources for news articles have been replaced by calls to diagnostic centers to find vials of antiviral drugs for family members and friends who are sick.

India is facing a severe shortage of medicines and oxygen. People have died while waiting to see a doctor. Crematoriums have been overflowing with COVID-19 victims, and photos of burning funeral pyres in some parts of the country have been called a symbol of a country in crisis.

The majority of rural districts that are reporting high positivity rates are also reporting an alarming decline in vaccination, the analysis found. The data analysis showed that rural districts are getting fewer doses because of a controversial government policy that has led to a decentralization of vaccine procurement, the report said.

An investigation by NDTV journalists who visited crematoriums and cross-checked the information with one week of official data found that at least 1,150 deaths may not have been included in the official list of coronavirus victims.

Trustworthy information is vital to provide the public with the right tools to distinguish between fake remedies and real cures, and curb the effects of misinformation such as racist attacks against minorities falsely accused of spreading the virus, according to Nazakat.

Security officers carry boxes of material confiscated after a raid at the office of NewsClick in New Delhi, India, Tuesday. Indian police raided the offices of the news website as well as the homes of several of its journalists, in what critics described as an attack on one of India's few remaining independent news outlets. Dinesh Joshi/AP hide caption

NewsClick, founded in 2009, is known as a rare Indian news outlet willing to criticize Prime Minister Narendra Modi. A number of other news organizations have been investigated for financial impropriety under Modi's Hindu nationalist government, as international monitors warn that press freedom is eroding in India.

Indian authorities registered a case against the site and its journalists on Aug. 17, weeks after a New York Times report alleged that the website had received funds from an American millionaire who, the Times wrote, has funded the spread of "Chinese propaganda." NewsClick has denied the charges.

The case was filed under a wide-ranging anti-terrorism law that allows charges for "anti-national activities" and has been used against activists, journalists and critics of Modi, some of whom have spent years in jail before going to trial. No one has been arrested in connection with NewsClick so far.

Delhi police did not immediately respond for a comment, but India's junior minister for information and broadcasting, Anurag Thakur, told reporters that "if anyone has committed anything wrong, search agencies are free to carry out investigations against them."

In August, Thakur accused NewsClick of spreading an "anti-India agenda," citing the New York Times, and of working with the opposition Indian National Congress party. Both NewsClick and the Congress party denied the accusations.

Reporters Without Borders, an advocacy group for journalists, ranked the country 161st in its press freedom rankings this year, writing that the situation in the country has deteriorated from "problematic" to "very bad."

Ties between India and China have been strained since 2020, when clashes between the two militaries in a disputed border area killed at least 20 Indian troops and four Chinese soldiers. Since then, New Delhi has banned many Chinese-owned apps, including TikTok, and launched tax probes into some Chinese mobile phone companies.

The Wire is an Indian nonprofit news and opinion website.[1] It was founded in 2015 by Siddharth Varadarajan, Sidharth Bhatia, and M. K. Venu.[2][3] It counts among the news outlets that are independent of the Indian government,[1] and has been subject to several defamation suits by businessmen and politicians. In 2022, one of its reporters fabricated several news stories, and was then fired.[4]

The Wire was founded by Siddharth Varadarajan, after he was removed from his position as editor at The Hindu.[5][6] It began operating on 11 May 2015; Varadarajan worked with Sidharth Bhatia and M. K. Venu who had initially funded the website. Later it was made part of the Foundation for Independent Journalism, a non-profit.[3] The Independent and Public Spirited Media Foundation has provided The Wire with funding as well.[3]

Varadarajan claims that the publication was created as a "platform for independent journalism",[7] and that its non-corporate structure and funding sources aim to free it from the "commercial and political pressures" which supposedly afflict mainstream Indian news outlets.[7][1][8] The Wire's founding is construed to be a result of and a reaction to a political environment which has "discouraged dissent" against the present Indian ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.[1]

According to a 2017 article of the Mint, the websites coverage primarily focused on the topics of development, foreign policy, political economy, politics and science.[7] Karan Thapar's regular show The Interview with Karan Thapar covers current affairs and events on The Wire.[13]

Dheeraj Mishra, Seemi Pasha Win Ramnath Goenka Awards for 2019 Reports for 'The Wire'.[14] Three journalists working for The Wire, have won the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Awards.[15][16] Neha Dixit, reporting on extrajudicial killings and illegal detentions, won the CPJ International Press Freedom Award in 2017, Chameli Devi Jain Award for Outstanding Women Mediapersons in 2016, and the Lorenzo Natali Journalism Prize.[17][18][19][20][non-primary source needed] A story published in the Columbia Journalism Review in late 2016 identified The Wire as one of several independent and recently founded internet-based media platforms-a group that also included Newslaundry, Scroll.in, The News Minute, The Quint and ScoopWhoop-that were attempting to challenge the dominance of India's traditional print and television news companies and their online offshoots.[1]

Siddharth Vardarajan was awarded with the Shorenstein Prize in 2017; jury member of the award Nayan Chanda mentioned Vardarajan's independent web-based journalism-venture and distinguished body of well-researched reports to be an epitome of journalistic excellence and innovation.[21] In November 2019, The Network of Women in Media, India criticised The Wire for providing a platform to Vinod Dua for making fun of an allegation of sexual harassment against him.[22] A December 2019 article by Dexter Filkins of The New Yorker, noted that The Wire is one of the few small outfits and the most prominent (other than The Caravan), to have engaged in providing aggressive coverage of the current Indian Govt ruled by BJP at a time when mainstream media is failing to do so.[23]

In September 2021, The Wire received the 2021 Free Media Pioneer Award given by the International Press Institute for being 'an unflinching defender of independent, high-quality journalism'.[24]

Bloomberg and Editors Guild of India also later retracted their coverage of Tek Fog, which was solely based on The Wire's reporting.[34][35] The Guild in its statement, urged newsrooms 'to resist the temptation of moving fast on sensitive stories, circumventing due journalistic norms.'[36] The Guild also called the lapses by The Wire 'condemnable' in a subsequent statement.[37]

Rajeev Chandrasekhar, a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP in the Rajya Sabha and venture capitalist, filed a defamation suit in a Bangalore civil court after two articles suggested a conflict of interest between Chandrasekhar's role as a legislator and his investments in the Indian media and defence industries.[38][39] The court eventually ruled in favour of The Wire.[40][41]

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