Through local papers and word of mouth, volunteer Daya Shankar keeps track of a very specific cause of death. As soon as he receives news of someone being struck by lightning around his neighborhood in Jharkhand, East India, he picks up his motorcycle and heads to the destination. Sometimes he …
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In April, an unassuming old building in New Delhi’s furniture market housed roughly 30 youngsters. Some were hunched over their laptops crunching data on Excel or analyzing a heat map, while others huddled to discuss strategy. These were engineering graduates, economists, political scientists, and others. There were office chairs, desks, …
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This summer, India has endured possibly its worst ever heatwave. The capital, Delhi, logged a record high of 52.9 degrees Celsius (127 degrees Fahrenheit) on May 29, while India’s northern states have baked at sustained temperatures of more than 42 degrees during the daytime. Only now, as the rainy season …
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Hi! I’m Vittoria Elliott. I’m a reporter on the WIRED Politics desk, and I’m taking over for Makena this week to talk about politicians rising from the dead in India and the rapper Eminem endorsing opposition parties in South Africa. These things haven’t really happened, obviously, but deepfakes created by …
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Thousands of law enforcement officials and people applying to be police officers in India have had their personal information leaked online—including fingerprints, facial scan images, signatures, and details of tattoos and scars on their bodies. If that wasn’t alarming enough, at around the same time, cybercriminals have started to advertise …
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In 2017, Pratik Sinha and Mohammed Zubair cofounded the fact-checking website AltNews in India. Almost immediately, the pair were targeted with persistent and vicious attacks from the far-right news website OpIndia. Many of the attacks claimed that Zubair was a Rohingya Muslim who illegally migrated to India and that his …
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This story originally appeared on Yale Environment 360 and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. There is a solar-powered revolution going on in the fields of India. By 2026, more than 3 million farmers will be raising irrigation water from beneath their fields using solar-powered pumps. With effectively free …
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India, the world’s largest democracy, prepares to kick off its election season in just a matter of weeks. But activists and experts worry that the government is cracking down on platforms and internet service providers to silence critical voices and tighten its grip on the information ecosystem. On January 16, …
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Hacker-for-hire firms like NSO Group and Hacking Team have become notorious for enabling their customers to spy on vulnerable members of civil society. But as far back as a decade ago in India, a startup called Appin Technology and its subsidiaries allegedly played a similar cyber-mercenary role while attracting far …
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India is less than a month away from a national election in the world’s largest democracy. But a new report from the nonprofit Global Witness and the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) finds that YouTube and Koo, a homegrown Twitter-style alternative that specializes in Indian languages, continue to allow hateful content …
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