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BOOM Live is one of India's pioneering fact-checking organisations, a digital media outlet dedicated to verifying claims made by politicians and public figures and to debunking the fake news that floods Indian social media. Founded by veteran business journalist Govindraj Ethiraj — the man behind IndiaSpend, the country's first data-journalism initiative — BOOM began in January 2015 as a general-purpose news and fact-checking channel and was refocused by 2016 into a full-fledged fact-checking operation. It is part of the Ping Digital Broadcast network and publishes in English, Hindi and Bengali from its Mumbai newsroom. BOOM's journalists combine data-driven verification of political claims with rapid-response debunking of viral misinformation on WhatsApp, Facebook, X and YouTube, and its WhatsApp tipline invites readers to submit suspicious forwards for verification. A certified signatory of the International Fact-Checking Network, BOOM has become a reference source for journalists, researchers and platforms navigating India's misinformation crisis.
BOOM's origins lie in Govindraj Ethiraj's earlier experiments with accountability journalism. In 2011 he co-founded the Spending and Policy Research Foundation, the trust that runs IndiaSpend, India's first data-journalism initiative; in 2014, ahead of the general elections, he launched FactChecker.in, inspired by American fact-checking practices, to verify statements made by political candidates. In the same year he co-founded two for-profit companies, Ping Digital Broadcast — an online multi-channel network — and BOOM, which began in January 2015 as a general-purpose news and fact-checking channel.
The pivot came quickly. Ethiraj realised that a rising swirl of fake news was travelling beneath the radar of conventional fact-checking: videos with juxtaposed images, software-generated audio and video clips, bot-amplified trends, and forwards that moved 'like water from a fire hose' on Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and Telegram. In 2016 he spun BOOM off as a full-fledged fact-checking initiative dedicated to combating this subterranean ecosystem — weeks-old photographs of resting soldiers presented as images taken hours before the Pulwama attack, pictures from old political rallies passed off as current roadshows, and the everyday forwards that have sparked real-life unrest. One early profile described BOOM as 'more Snopes.com than its peer AltNews', a general-purpose verification desk for the viral age.
Govindraj Ethiraj is among the most influential figures in modern Indian journalism. Educated at Elphinstone College, University of Mumbai, he worked as a journalist with The Economic Times and Business Standard before moving to television with CNBC TV18. He later became the founding editor-in-chief of Bloomberg UTV, the business news channel, stepping down in September 2010 to volunteer with the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) on the Aadhaar project — an unusual move from a newsroom's top job to public service.
Ethiraj's entrepreneurial phase reshaped Indian digital journalism. IndiaSpend, launched through the trust he co-founded in 2011, pioneered data journalism in the country, publishing fact-based stories on governance, education and public policy. FactChecker.in (2014) was India's first dedicated political fact-checking project. Ping Digital Broadcast and BOOM (2014–15) extended the model into video and general news. His work earned him the BMW Foundation Responsible Leaders Award in 2014 and a Kamalnayan Bajaj Fellowship at the Aspen Institute in Colorado. Today he also hosts The Core Report, a widely followed business-news podcast and broadcast, continuing a career that has moved from print to television to digital to audio without losing its data-driven core.
BOOM's methodology has two tracks that reflect its dual origins. The first is the verification of claims by politicians and public figures against data available in the public domain — the FactChecker.in inheritance. Its journalists take a minister's assertion about terror attacks, an MP's claim about economic data, or a party's statistics about welfare delivery, and test them against official records, parliamentary data, budget documents and independent datasets. In its early years the team reported that in over 90 per cent of cases, political claims turned out to be far from the truth.
The second track is the debunking of viral misinformation: the false forwards, doctored images, misattributed videos and manufactured quotes that circulate on WhatsApp and social platforms. Here BOOM deploys the standard forensic toolkit — reverse-image search, video frame analysis, geolocation, metadata checks and source tracing — and publishes its findings as clearly labelled fact-checks with verdicts. Its WhatsApp tipline, widely publicised in multiple languages, allows readers to forward suspicious messages directly to the newsroom, turning the audience into a distributed early-warning system for viral falsehoods.
BOOM publishes in English, Hindi and Bengali, a trilingual structure that reflects where India's misinformation actually circulates. While English fact-checks serve journalists, researchers and policymakers, the Hindi and Bengali editions address the vernacular WhatsApp and Facebook ecosystems where false forwards do their greatest damage. Misinformation in India is overwhelmingly a vernacular phenomenon — health rumours, communal provocations and political fabrications travel in Hindi, Bengali and other languages far more than in English — and BOOM's language editions are designed to meet it there.
The multilingual newsroom also powers BOOM's work during elections, when the Election Commission, platforms and civil society lean on fact-checkers to monitor the information environment across languages. BOOM's Hindi and Bengali teams produce rapid-response debunks timed to the news cycle in the Hindi heartland and West Bengal respectively, two of the country's most electorally significant and misinformation-dense regions. This linguistic reach is one of the organisation's principal differentiators in the Indian fact-checking space.
BOOM's investigations span the full repertoire of Indian misinformation. It has debunked old photographs recirculated as breaking news — soldiers, disaster scenes, political rallies presented as current events; exposed digitally manipulated videos of political leaders; traced communal forwards designed to inflame tensions during riots and elections; and fact-checked the economic and governance claims of ministers and opposition leaders alike. During the COVID-19 pandemic, its health-misinformation debunks — on fake cures, vaccine rumours and fabricated advisories — served as a public-health utility.
The outlet has also investigated the infrastructure of misinformation itself: coordinated networks, bot amplification, and the political economy of fake-news websites. Its work is routinely cited by mainstream Indian and international media, and its fact-checks have led to content removals, police clarifications and corrections by public figures. In election seasons, BOOM functions as a real-time verification desk, publishing debunks within hours of a falsehood going viral — a tempo that traditional newsrooms, built for the daily cycle, struggle to match.
BOOM is a certified signatory of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), adhering to its code of principles on non-partisanship, transparency of sources and funding, transparency of methodology, and open corrections. IFCN certification has made BOOM part of the global fact-checking infrastructure, including third-party fact-checking partnerships with major technology platforms that rely on certified fact-checkers to review and rate potentially false content circulating on their services in India.
The organisation has also collaborated directly with platforms on media-literacy and election-integrity initiatives. In 2016, Twitter India and the Ping Network launched #MegaBites, a live video interview series with business and technology leaders on Periscope hosted by Ethiraj — the first episode, streamed via BOOM, featured Godrej Group chairman Adi Godrej discussing whether India would remain a fast-growth economy. Such partnerships reflect BOOM's hybrid identity: part newsroom, part technology-facing verification utility.
BOOM sits within Ping Digital Broadcast, the digital multi-channel network Ethiraj co-founded in 2014 alongside IndiaSpend and FactChecker.in. The network was conceived as a home for niche digital media properties — the thesis being that digital and niches go together, and that focused verticals could succeed where horizontal, generalist news portals struggled. IndiaSpend covers data journalism, FactChecker.in (now BOOM's sibling operation) verified political claims, and BOOM handles general fact-checking and misinformation.
This network structure gives BOOM shared technology, distribution and business infrastructure while preserving its editorial focus. It also reflects Ethiraj's broader theory of Indian digital media: that sustainable journalism online would be built not by replicating newspapers on the web but by creating specialised, mission-driven products for defined audiences. A decade on, with fact-checking recognised globally as essential democratic infrastructure, the thesis looks prescient.
BOOM operates as a for-profit company within the Ping network, with revenues drawn from a mix of platform partnerships, grants, syndication, branded content and services. Like other fact-checking organisations worldwide, it has benefited from the willingness of technology platforms and philanthropic foundations to fund verification work, particularly around elections. Its multilingual output also makes its content syndicable to regional media houses that lack their own fact-checking desks.
The organisation has kept its team lean and specialised — journalists, researchers and video producers rather than a sprawling general newsroom — which keeps costs aligned with the economics of niche digital media. Its WhatsApp tipline and social distribution give it reach far beyond its newsroom's size, and its reputation as a neutral arbiter has made its verdicts a currency cited across the media ecosystem, from television debates to courtrooms.
BOOM's impact is measured less in page views than in the elevation of verification as a journalistic discipline in India. Alongside Alt News, it professionalised fact-checking before platforms and regulators treated misinformation as a systemic threat; its methods, verdict formats and tipline model have been widely imitated. Its data-driven checks of political claims helped normalise the idea that politicians' statements should be routinely tested against evidence — a practice now embedded in Indian election coverage.
More broadly, BOOM represents the maturation of a distinctively Indian answer to the global misinformation crisis: vernacular, WhatsApp-native, data-literate and institutionally networked. In a country where a single forwarded rumour has repeatedly preceded mob violence, the work of verifying a video's origin or a photograph's date is not an academic exercise but a public-safety function. That BOOM has performed this function continuously for a decade, through elections, a pandemic and multiple information wars, is the measure of its significance.
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Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
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