-TheWire.in/ The Reporters' Collective * Excess deaths in Rajasthan, Jharkhand and Andhra Pradesh were over 12-times the corresponding official COVID-19 death toll until early January 2022. * Data from across the country suggests governments are undercounting COVID-19 deaths by the lakhs, possibly to avoid the charge of epidemic mismanagement. * As a result, facilitated by disparate protocols, poor record-keeping and red-tape, thousands of families haven’t received the compensation they are due. Last year, just as...

-The Telegraph Ordinance seeks to amend Section 14 of the Act, 1999, by inserting provision that the government may 'accept or reject' declarations or orders Bangalore: The CPI, a partner in Kerala’s Left Democratic Front government, has alleged that no political consultations were held prior to presenting before the cabinet the government’s ordinance to make Lokayukta orders non-binding on it. State CPI secretary Kanam Rajendran said the government should not have taken the...

-The Telegraph The police as the arbiters of communication For a country with serious challenges to tackle, the amount of time and energy of government agencies and courts that is now spent on offence-taking and conspiracy-chasing borders on the ludicrous. Through 2021, the police in various parts of the country sought to criminalize news gathering as well as social media expressions, registering first information reports indiscriminately under various sections of the Criminal...

-NDTV.com Lakhimpur-Kheri Case: Thousands of pages of the chargesheet were brought to the court of the chief judicial magistrate in Lakhimpur town in a big trunk secured by two locks earlier this morning by the police Lucknow: The Uttar Pradesh Police's special investigation team probing the Lakhimpur Kheri incident where four farmers and a journalist were murdered during an anti-farm law protest last October has submitted a 5,000-page chargesheet to a local...

-Newslaundry.com Report also mentions the ‘11 journalism rules’ giving rise to censorship and impacting press freedom. Sixty percent of media employees have not been able to work and 84 percent of women journalists have lost their jobs since the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan in August, according to a report released by Reporters Without Borders and Afghan Independent Journalists Association. The report also stated that 43 percent of Afghan media outlets have disappeared. Compared...