Yeah, mainly TV.

If people are unhappy with the traditional larger media, then we’re to take off in a good way. That’s the sense I get, that people are really unhappy with the mainstream media here.

The general feeling which I get is that it’s not happening at a larger scale which needs to be done. I don’t know. I have just been here for four days. I travel and talked to a lot of people. That’s what it is.

This would also make it mainstream news that this initiative has been working. It started. Then people who are contributing have a stake in it. Then their family and friends will also be involved. It’s happening.

The end result is for people because they are the one who are affected by it.

Do you think not a government initiative but some independent initiative on a larger scale which is crowdfunded so people have a stake in it? They have ownership in it.

They must be so troubled to see what is happening.

Every other day, there is a case against a media organization.

It’s just reactionary. If you heard something, then you clarify on the website that...

Not major government initiative?

That’s nice to know. [laughs] Also, the general impression is that government should take a lead on tackling misinformation, which is still third-party fact-checker thing?

That’s smart.

[laughs]

That’s much quicker. I don’t think policies are made out so quickly anyway.

I don’t think anywhere in the world this model has been applied or worked. It’s really amazing.

I suppose you’re not too popular among the ministries?

[laughs]

[laughs] It’s funny how...

There’s no need for it? Also, this still looks to me like more of an urban and social media phenomenon.

That builds your own community, in a way, that you’re responsive to people’s problems and issues. Then there’s nothing more they want.

Always the case.

I’ll drop in. [laughs]

You’re going to be there tomorrow?

On ground, is there anything being done to tackle it? This is still social media, face-to-face, or community level.

It doesn’t have a URL.

They spread it around on the public Internet, yeah.

What I saw in the presentation was that this bot has very limited reach right now, some 50,000 or 60,000 subscribers?

That happens a lot.

That’s good. [laughs]

It’s a long chain.

In terms of fact checking, are you supporting third-party fact-checkers?

It gives a very good context to it.

Do you think crowdfunding will work here?

Now we can see that after one and a half years it has been effective, that the incidence of violence has gone down. People are coming together thanks to this media because it’s showing different angles. It’s showing different opinions and perspectives, which they won’t see.

Because he is independent, he has no pressure from the media organizations. We also helped expand a set up of a grassroots media company in a very violent area of a state where there was a huge polarization of Hindus and Muslims.

Out of that, one was a very senior investigative journalist Paranjoy Guha Thakurta who was removed from an organization because he did a very strong anti-corporate story, against a group owned by Gautam Adani, our PMs bff. The corporate filed a case. The media organization removed him. Then he was ...

Just transactional because sustenance-wise there are a lot of independent websites. They have subscribers who pay monthly donations. We did around seven - eight media campaigns.

We do campaign based.

Yeah, I guess balance is the way. [laughs] That was one of the major reasons we started crowdfunding, because media today is controlled by corporate. There’s no way you can change that in mainstream.

In that way, media needs to be...

Some of them realize it and some of them are changing, but who are sold to the strong ideology, they won’t change. At the same time, if the mainstream media keeps on repeating the same propaganda again and again and they also don’t have avenue to change their opinion, even ...

They’re changing because they also realize how the governments performance is weak economically. They also realize, "OK, this information was false, which the prime minister claimed that this has happened, and it didn’t happen."

It’s both layers. People selectively understanding is there. The last four years, this government has been in power in India. The way people used to perceive two years back has changed. They’re not that adhered supporter of the government maybe, some of them.

That’s also happening in terms of changing curriculum. You’re trying to teach students to make their own opinions. Here, you’re imposing a false opinion to students.

Yeah, patriotic. It’s a false propaganda. It’s not based on history, and history in terms of just the end result of a war, not how it happened and what had been happened -- there can be perspectives and views about that -- but changing the outcome and claiming something which ...

It’s out of a motivation of appeasing the Hindu majority. This is right-wing Hindu government so they want to portray that they are the saviours. You need their government to make sure that Hindus are safe, which are 79 percent. They’re not under threat, but they want to create the ...

That’s what I’m saying in terms of facts.

There is a written historical reality of which king won and which king didn’t. Apparently, when there was a Mughal invasion in India and there were Hindu kings, local kings, most of the Hindu local kings lost because the Mughals had a huge army. They had artillery, everything. Now, they’re ...

In terms of rewriting history in India, they are changing the end results of wars basically.

Narratives are different.