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India Slips To 131st Position On Press Freedom Index Worldwide
India has been jousting with the world in UN meets and other major international conferences – to the repeated allegations and jeers put up against it by all countries, about the freedom of press and civil speech. India has been strategic about flamboyantly showing off its rich culture and democratic ideals, when it comes to administration – posing as a liberal. But all this is very diabolical to the real story as told by the indices around the world, which have kept a strict watch over this emerging power.
Reporters without Boundaries, a global non-profit organization which is dedicated towards upliftment and righteous stance against censorship of journalism, in its Press Freedom Index of 2011-2012 has downgraded the ranking of India further from 122 last year to 131 as of now.
The index is prepared by means of a specific questionnaire and objective ranking system, which is quite complicated, in the sense that it considers legal freedom, penal code against irresponsible journalism, independence of the journalism in the community, finances at hand, impact of the news, etc.
The recent arrests of two women in Maharashtra for their alleged ‘degrading comments’ on the aftermath of Bal Thackeray’s demise, has garnered enough global attention; as US took special interest in reporting the late leader as a ‘demagogue’ who affects public life even on death bed. Bloomberg and Chicago Sun-Times were quite livid in their coverage of this piece of news. But this crackdown is just the tip of the iceberg. We all do remember the frenzied actions Congress shenanigans have been up to in recent times, going on record (like Kapil Sibal did) to bash up the freedom of speech on internet. But Press Freedom Index is not just about internet speech freedom, it’s about a country’s evocative position in the domain of journalism: print, TV or other media, altogether.
We have seen the truncation of internet speeds and surfing of social media sites in Kashmir recently. We have also witnessed Google going about with its public report about the heavy interest vested by Government in India, towards censorship of certain objectionable content this year. Apparently, Google in spite of everything did comply to remove about 62 of the requests for objectionable content online, out of the 282 requests it received between July and December 2010 – all coming from government of India officials.
In a recent blog here we observed that India was ranked 39th in the world as far as Internet freedom was concerned, as reported in Freedom On The Net (FOTN) released by Freedom House. Freedom House, a Washington based independent monitoring group, currently lists India as a ‘partly free’ press haven – a complete level below USA, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa and Australia, among many others. Interestingly, USA is ranked 47th in the Press Freedom Index. However, Indian Administration is slowly gathering too much of attention for its behavior in dealing with press, speech and transparency. How long will this continue? Will poor rankings like this affect any change in the way the Government handles press freedom?
Image Courtesy | en.rsf.org
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2012-11-21 05:40:19
Source: http://www.watblog.com/2012/11/21/india-slips-to-131st-position-on-press-freedom-index-worldwide/
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