Areas of Interest

Our investigation work centers on four interconnected areas: media accountability, digital infrastructure transparency, neighborhood governance and environmental tracking, and building community investigative capacity.

Media Accountability

We investigate how media organizations operate, what they cover, and what they ignore. The goal is not media criticism but systematic analysis that can inform public understanding of the information environment.

• Mapping Media Coverage: Systematically tracking and analyzing newspaper and digital outlet content. What topics get prioritized? Which regions or communities are over or under-represented?
• Broadcast Analysis: Recording television news channels to measure allocation of time between news, advertisements, and other content. How much time is dedicated to substantive news versus sensationalism? What important stories are ignored or minimized?
• Identifying Media Deserts: Pinpointing areas where local or critical news coverage is thin or non-existent
• Investigating Media Ownership and Bias: Understanding ownership structures of media houses and how they might influence editorial decisions

Outputs: Coverage gap reports, media ownership maps, monitoring dashboards, published analyses of coverage patterns.

Digital Infrastructure Transparency

Our tech investigation work focuses on understanding the digital and physical infrastructure that shapes lives in opaque ways. We investigate systems to improve transparency and accountability—not to teach digital literacy, but to expose how these systems actually behave.

• Government & Public Infrastructure Analysis: Investigating digital government infrastructure for transparency and accessibility gaps. We analyze government websites for security practices, linkrot, data collection patterns, and the gap between claimed functionality and actual behavior.
• Mobile Apps & Digital Transparency: Understanding what mobile applications (especially payment systems, government services, and delivery platforms) actually do behind the scenes. This involves static and dynamic analysis to examine code, permissions, network communications, and data collection patterns.
• Algorithmic Accountability: How do recommendation systems, content moderation, and automated decisions affect local communities? What biases and patterns emerge from these systems?
• Platform Transparency: What data do commonly-used apps collect? How do their actual behaviors match their stated policies?

Outputs: Security audit reports, app behavior analyses, transparency scorecards, published investigations into platform practices.

Neighborhood Governance & Environment

Local government remains one of the least transparent levels of governance despite affecting daily life most directly. Environmental accountability at the neighborhood scale often falls through the cracks between regulatory bodies.

• Financial Transparency: Tracking municipal budgets, expenditures, and contractor/tender processes to identify patterns of allocation, favoritism, and project completion
• Municipal Operations Oversight: Verification of service delivery (water, waste, roads, lighting), construction compliance, displacement impacts, and infrastructure development effects on community systems
• Governance Accountability: Investigating official decision-making processes, tracking commitments versus delivery, documenting gaps between policy and practice
• Environmental Violation Tracking: Systematic tracking of pollution sources, water body encroachment, green space loss, and waste management failures. The focus here is on accountability—identifying violations, tracking responsible parties, and documenting regulatory failures (distinct from ecological documentation, which preserves environmental knowledge and biodiversity stories)

Outputs: Budget tracking tools, service delivery verification reports, environmental violation documentation, accountability timelines.

Building Investigative Capacity

Creating the foundation for community-led investigation. Local news has largely disappeared, and what remains focuses on crime and disasters rather than the texture of community life. The goal is not to replace professional journalism but to build community capacity for systematic investigation.

• Verification Skills: Teaching basic fact-checking and source verification skills
• Story Identification: Helping community members recognize which observations point toward larger stories worth investigating
• Collaborative Investigation: Building networks where community members can contribute observations, leads, and local knowledge to ongoing investigations

Outputs: Trained community investigators, active observer networks, collaborative investigation partnerships.

References

Media accountability resources:

• The Reporters' Collective: Indian investigative journalism collective
• Citizen Matters: Civic media platform for urban issues
• IndiaSpend: Data journalism focused on public interest

A key question for this work: are there other organizations, in India or globally, that are systematically monitoring media in this way? We aim to learn from existing efforts and contribute to a broader ecosystem of media accountability.

Digital rights and transparency:

• Electronic Frontier Foundation: Digital rights research and advocacy
• Internet Freedom Foundation: Digital rights and transparency advocacy in India

Civic engagement:

• Zencitizen: Tools for civic engagement and RTI filing in India