in India

by Dr Ravi Chaturvedi

14/09/2026

Democracy is often imagined in grand settings. Parliament, elections, courts, television studios and national headlines. But for most citizens, democracy is experienced much closer to home: in the government school, the district hospital, the panchayat office, the police station or the block office.

That is where a road is sanctioned or abandoned. Where medicines reach a hospital, or do not. Where a school has teachers or exists largely on paper. Where a government scheme reaches its intended beneficiary or disappears somewhere along the way.

And that is where someone needs to be watching.

In May this year, 60 students at a government school in Nalanda, Bihar, fell ill after consuming their midday meal. Media reporting brought the incident to wider attention. Five days later, the National Human Rights Commission took suo motu cognisance of the report and sought a detailed report from the district administration. The incident was a serious failure of a public service. But what followed also showed why journalism close to the ground matters. A problem that might have remained confined to one school entered the public domain and prompted an institutional response.

This is what local journalism does at its best. It takes something that may otherwise remain an allegation, a rumour or a private grievance and turns it into a public record. A social-media post can bring attention to a problem. A reporter can verify what happened, ask who is responsible, seek an answer and, when necessary, return to the story.

That persistence is what separates visibility from accountability. It creates a feedback loop between citizens and institutions. Remove the reporter, and the loop breaks. The consequence is not simply that fewer local stories appear in newspapers or on websites. Citizens increasingly have to navigate public life without a reliable record of what is happening around them. This is how news deserts emerge: places where events continue to happen but fewer people are professionally present to record them.

A news desert is not a place where nothing happens. It is a place where too little gets recorded.

Local journalism is therefore not simply national journalism on a smaller scale. Its importance lies in proximity. A block grant is sanctioned in Bundelkhand. A tender is awarded in Agra. A school inspection report is filed in Gaya and forgotten. A culvert is badly built in a village that no television channel will ever visit. Yet these are precisely the places where public money becomes public good, or quietly fails to do so. The stories with the greatest public value often have the smallest commercial value. That is one reason local journalism is so difficult to sustain.

The problem is not that local journalism cannot be done. It can. Organisations such as Khabar Lahariya and 101Reporters have demonstrated that grassroots reporting can be built through networks of local journalists and digital platforms.

The harder question is whether such journalism can survive economically.

Recent developments in Bihar show how serious that question has become. Reporting from districts such as Siwan, Gaya and Purnea has documented the decline or closure of small-town newspapers as circulation and advertising revenues shrink. Some journalists are responding by moving to mobile reporting, WhatsApp networks and small digital ventures. The medium may be changing, but the democratic need has not.  Communities still need reporters who know the place, understand the context and can follow a story beyond the first notification.

Apart from small-town newsrooms been hollowed out, the stringers often cover large territories for very little remuneration. Recent reporting on rural Indian stringers found that some reporters are paid only a few hundred rupees for a story and often work without contracts, insurance or institutional protection. When a reporter has to finance travel and reporting from such earnings, investigative journalism becomes an act of personal sacrifice rather than a viable profession.

And economics is not the only price. There is also the price of asking questions.

In April this year, journalists Ashish Kumar and Sushant Kumar Soni were assaulted in Hazaribagh after asking critical questions at an impromptu media briefing by Jharkhand Health Minister Irfan Ansari. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, they were attacked by members of a crowd after questioning the minister about an air ambulance crash in neighbouring Chatra district. The journalists were injured and their reporting equipment was also targeted.

For a local reporter, press freedom is not an abstract constitutional principle. It is a condition of the job. A journalist who cannot safely ask a question, pursue a story or return for the answer cannot provide the kind of scrutiny a functioning democracy requires. That is why the debate about local journalism cannot stop at technology, readership or business models. It must also include safety, legal protection and editorial independence for journalists working closest to the ground.

But support must not become control.

A newsroom dependent on the very power it is expected to scrutinise carries an obvious danger. Local journalism needs sustainable revenue and diverse sources of support without surrendering its independence. The principle should be simple: Money may sustain journalism. It must never purchase its independence.

There is also a larger economic argument for taking local journalism seriously. A fraudulent contract, a neglected public facility or an unimplemented government scheme can cost citizens far more than the cost of the reporter who might have exposed it. The question, therefore, is not simply whether society can afford to support local journalism. It is whether democracy can afford its absence.

India’s news environment is changing rapidly. More citizens now encounter news through social and video platforms, while regional-language and hyperlocal content continue to play an important role. The 2026 Digital News Report found that around 58 per cent of respondents in India relied on YouTube for news, while overall trust in news stood at 39 per cent.

But greater access to information does not necessarily mean greater accountability.

A video can travel further than a newspaper report ever could. A WhatsApp message can alert an entire village within minutes. A citizen with a smartphone can bring an incident to public attention. But someone still has to establish what actually happened. That distinction matters. The digital environment has made visibility easier but it has not eliminated the need for verification, context, persistence and follow-up. If anything, the abundance of information makes those functions more important.

India does not need fewer national conversations. It needs more eyes and ears where those conversations become real: in the places where policies are implemented, public money is spent and citizens encounter the state. A policy announced in Delhi may make headlines. Whether it changes anything in a village may never do so.

That gap is democracy’s last mile.

And if there is nobody there to report what happens along it, citizens are left with the promise of government but not the evidence of its performance. Democracy does not end when a policy is announced. It has to be visible in what happens afterwards.

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Dr Ravi Chaturvedi is a media professional and academician with experience across reputed media brands and as Senior Faculty at an institution affiliated with Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, New Delhi. He writes on media, education and contemporary public affairs.