A lengthy article in The New Yorker takes a close look at India's newspaper industry, which, unlike the newspaper industry in the United States â€" which has lost 50 percent of its advertising revenue in the past five years â€" is thriving. There are an estimated 80,000 newspapers in India, the article finds, 85 percent of which are printed in one of India's 22 official regional languages, and the circulation of English-language newspapers is growing 1.5 percent each year.
Two reasons for this phenomenon, the author, Ken Auletta, writes, are the “absence of digital competition,†which has not expanded because access to the Internet in India continues to be limited, and the low price of newspapers, which cost between 5 to 10 cents, daily.
But the fundamental factor driving the industry's growth becomes clear as the article explores the business model adopted by The Times of India, the world's largest English-language paper with a daily circulation of more than four million. “We are not in the newspaper industry, we are in the advertising business,†the article quotes Vineet Jain, managing director of the media conglomerate that owns the paper, as saying.
Explaining this strategy, the author writes:
In the U.S., several years ago, editors of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal debated whether readers would be served, or journalism harmed, if the business department sold discreet ads that appeared on the papers' front pages. At the Times of India, or the Times Group, as the company is often called, the business side need not ask permission. The entire front page might be sold as an ad, for four hu ndred and fifty thousand dollars.
In an article titled “The Nowhere People,†Open Magazine explores the lives of Kashmiri Pandits who fled the Kashmir Valley during the height of the militancy in the 1990s and started returning in 2008 through a government program that housed them in mass settlements and offered them jobs.
The story provides a glimpse into Jagti Township, referred to locally as “Jagti Taavanship†(hellhole), a settlement 12 kilometers, or 7.5 miles, from Jammu where about 4,000 Pandit families were shifted last year. It portrays a life amid squalor in a town that has no proper housing, sewage disposal system or opportunities for employment.
The author, Rahul Pandita, finds that the real problem for the returnees is the harassment they say they face from Muslim colleagues at work.
“They treat us like pariahs,†says one female teacher. “My headmistress threw a notebook at me the other day and shout ed: ‘You sixth-grade pass-outs have come now to lord over us!' I wanted to tell her that I have a double Master's and a BEd degree.†They won't say it openly, but there is resentment in various sections of the majority community about the return package offered the Pandits.
The Caravan Magazine chronicles India's fight against a form of tuberculosis that appears to be resistant to existing drugs. The story begins in October 2011, when Zarir Udwadia, a prominent chest physician, sent a letter to a U.S. medical journal, describing his struggle to treat patients suffering from what he called totally drug-resistant, or TDR, tuberculosis.
Since then, doubts have been raised about Dr. Udwadia's conclusions, about the laboratory in which the tests were conducted, and even about the motivations of the doctors, who chose to take their findings to an international audience rather than the government.
“While health officials may have attempted to di scredit the news of a ‘totally drug-resistant' strain of tuberculosis as needlessly alarmist and based on faulty science,†the article says, “in an editorial published in the medical journal Thorax, Udwadia wrote that tuberculosis ‘remains India's biggest public health problem. India bears a disproportionately large burden of the world's TB, one a developing country can ill afford.'â€
