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Inside the five-year battle food companies have fought to resist stricter labelling norms

India’s food regulator proposed changes in labeling rules to empower consumers: if the quantity of fat/salt/sugar exceeds a specified threshold, food packets would have a front-of-pack warning label. But this policy is not moving, following fierce opposition from the industry. My interviews with scientists, government officials, independent

Inside the five-year battle food companies have fought to resist stricter labelling norms
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Inside India’s booming dark data economy

India’s booming dark data economy: spyware, detectives, data brokers, scammers—all that and more. Thanks to lax privacy laws and high consumer demand, details on everything from how you shop to who you date are all for sale. Read the story on Rest of World [https://restofworld.org/2020/

Inside India’s booming dark data economy
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Investigation: Faulty ventilators procured by the Indian government for COVID-19 management

In the last week of May 2020, I began working on a story with HuffPost India on what we thought would be a celebration of Indian ingenuity: A startup called AgVa had teamed up with Maruti Suzuki to build what they claimed was the world’s cheapest, smallest and most

Investigation: Faulty ventilators procured by the Indian government for COVID-19 management
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Indian Govt Trots Out Meaningless Data As COVID-19 Cases Rocket Despite Lockdown

The Indian government is using incomplete national-level data to justify arbitrary policy decisions, defend its record, and underplay the extent of the COVID-19 crisis.

Indian Govt Trots Out Meaningless Data As COVID-19 Cases Rocket Despite Lockdown
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India is pinning hopes on apps in virus fight

Indian public authorities are building apps—at least 17 are public—to fight COVID-19. In Mint, I wrote about the app ecosystem looking at two big products: Central government’s Aarogya Setu and Maharashtra government’s MahaKavach to explore what the apps can do, what they can’t and where

India is pinning hopes on apps in virus fight
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The murky world of India’s fintech scams

Wallets and UPI have taken over the Indian digital payment ecosystem. The reduction of friction in payments is driving the growth of new businesses. But it is also orchestrating fraud: thousands of Indians experience digital payment frauds every day, with sums ranging from a few thousand rupees to several lakhs.

The murky world of India’s fintech scams
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How Chinese dating apps are exploiting the loneliness of India’s men

Dozens of scammy Chinese dating apps are exploiting the loneliness of Indian men outside of the Tinder-Bumble demographic. That includes India’s most downloaded dating app in 2019, L’amour. It’s as mainstream as it can get. What happens when men sign up? How does the machinery operate behind

How Chinese dating apps are exploiting the loneliness of India’s men
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Why India is falling behind in the Y2Q race

Encryption forms the backbone of secure cyberspace. It helps to protect the data we send, receive or store. Behind the high degree of confidence in the security of the most commonly used encryption algorithms, like RSA, lies an assumption: modern computers, including the fastest supercomputers, will take forever to factor

Why India is falling behind in the Y2Q race
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India’s proposed data protection act, explained

India’s parliamentarians must deliberate on the shortcomings of this bill. And if they want to empower individuals, they need to cede some of their own powers

India’s proposed data protection act, explained
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India’s fake news challenge

Many of India’s misinformation campaigns are developed and run by political parties with nationwide cyberarmies.

India’s fake news challenge