India Together

About India Together

India Together is a Bengaluru-based online news and features service publishing in-depth reporting on public affairs, environment and governance. Founded in 1998, it is an electronic journal for development communication, public affairs and policy that has spent more than a quarter of a century covering India's development experience in what it calls "the news in proportion." It is edited by Ashwin Mahesh, who co-founded the publication with Subramaniam Vincent. Its official website is indiatogether.org.

Overview

India Together occupies a distinctive position in Indian journalism: it is neither a daily newspaper nor a conventional news website, but a magazine-style electronic journal devoted to depth rather than speed. It provides in-depth information and news on the issues that matter, organised across fifteen major development topics and across the states of India, with the explicit aim of giving development stories coverage in proportion to the country's broad development experiences. Its stories include reports from professional freelance journalists, columns from journalists and people with knowledge in their fields, and perspectives, commentary, interpretative and analysis articles from practitioners and experts, including occasional guest contributors.

Every article passes through an editorial process that India Together treats as central to its identity: editors subject material to in-depth review, authors respond to questions and make clarifications, and authors review the final cut before publication. The result is journalism that reads less like a news feed and more like a curated, peer-scrutinised magazine — a model the publication has maintained since long before slow journalism became fashionable.

Founding: 1998 and the internet's early promise

India Together was founded in 1998 by Ashwin Mahesh and Subramaniam Vincent, at a moment when the Indian internet was still young and its journalistic possibilities were largely unexplored. The founders saw in the web a way to do what commercial mass media was not doing: to provide sustained, serious coverage of development and public-affairs issues for readers who wanted more than event-driven news. From the start, the publication positioned itself as a canvas for repainting how news on the internet could work — organised for both general readers and specialists, without favouring one over the other, so that both types of audiences and contributors could learn from each other.

Ashwin Mahesh remains the editor of the publication, providing editorial continuity across more than twenty-five years. The co-founders' vision drew on a critique of mainstream coverage that India Together has articulated since its earliest days: that mass media allocates little space for depth because advertising revenue drives it toward news of perceived immediate utility for a mass audience; that commercial outlets offer limited analysis of policy and development matters; that many chief editors remain inaccessible to practitioners and experts with specialised knowledge. India Together was built to fill precisely those gaps.

"The news in proportion"

The publication's tagline, "The news in proportion," captures its founding editorial philosophy. The argument is that commercial news media's allocation of attention is distorted by commercial incentives: development issues that affect hundreds of millions of Indians — water management, public health systems, urban planning, forest rights, education policy — receive far less coverage than their social importance warrants, while politics and spectacle receive far more. India Together set out to correct that distortion by giving issues coverage in proportion to their weight in the country's development experience.

This philosophy shapes both what the publication covers and how it covers it. Rather than chasing the news cycle, its editors seek to act as stewards of informative discussion around issues: they interact with authors to structure and strengthen material, remove weak arguments, and recognise that most development issues are inter-linked — and they use the internet's capacities to place articles in a far more informative context than print ever could, linking stories across topics and over time.

The fifteen topics

India Together organises its content across fifteen major developmental topics, each subdivided into specialist sections. The Agriculture section covers agribusiness, food security, GM crops, horticulture, livestock, organic farming and policy. Children covers health, child labour and education. The Economy section spans agribusiness, consumers, energy, fisheries, housing, labour issues, livelihoods, micro-finance, public funds, tourism and transport. Education is divided into curricula, environment, girls' education, laws and policy, literacy, opinions, organisations, skills development and special education.

Environment covers biodiversity, cities, climate, education, energy, fisheries, forests, hazards, laws and regulations, mining, reviews, waste management, water resources and wildlife. Government covers cities, e-government, elections, environment regulation, law and order, national security, opinions, panchayats and public funds. Health covers AIDS, child health, disability, environmental hazards, laws and regulations, mental health, population, public health, sanitation and women's health. Human Rights covers Adivasis, caste, child labour, displacement, dowry, food security, gender violence, the justice system, labour issues and sanitation. Laws and Regulations spans education, environment, gender, health, the justice system and the right to information. The Media section covers creative media, gender, opinions, radio and the press; and Poverty covers food security, housing and shelter, labour issues, land rights, livelihoods, micro-finance and the urban poor.

This fine-grained taxonomy is itself an editorial statement: it treats development as a set of interconnected systems — water, forests, cities, schools, courts, budgets — and gives each a permanent home where coverage can accumulate into a genuine body of knowledge over the years.

Contributors and the editorial process

India Together's pages carry a wide cast of contributors: professional freelance journalists file reported stories, while columns, perspectives and analysis come from journalists, practitioners, scholars and artists with knowledge in their fields. The publication explicitly helps leaders, experts, practitioners, scholars and artists take their ideas, insights and concerns expeditiously to an interested national and global audience — a role that has made it a platform where field experience and policy expertise meet.

The editorial process is unusually rigorous for an online publication. All articles are published only after in-depth reviews of material by editors, during which authors respond to questions and make clarifications; authors get to review the final cut before publication. This review discipline — closer to an academic journal's than a newspaper's — is part of what has given India Together its reputation for reliability among researchers, policymakers and practitioners who cite its material.

Oorvani Foundation and independent media

Since 2014, India Together's journalism has been supported by Oorvani Foundation, a non-profit trust set up to ensure an independent, community-funded media. The foundation develops and promotes deep-diving journalism on governance, citizenship and society at the city, state and national levels. Oorvani also publishes Citizen Matters, a sister publication focusing on civics, communities and citizenship in several Indian cities — extending the same depth-first, community-funded model to urban civic journalism.

The Oorvani arrangement reflects a deliberate choice about media independence: by anchoring its funding in a non-profit trust oriented toward community-funded journalism rather than advertising or corporate ownership, India Together has insulated its editorial mission from the commercial pressures that it argues distort mainstream development coverage. It is a model of public-interest journalism financing that predates the current global experimentation with non-profit news.

Coverage record

India Together's archive spans more than two and a half decades of Indian public life, and it continues to publish. Recent items include a nationwide survey finding on cybercrime and household trust in response systems (October 2026), Telangana's proposed restructuring of its public-school system (September 2026), Assam's experiments in neighbourhood-level urban planning, debates over how Indian cities should measure mobility, and ecological analysis of Kaziranga's buffer zones. The range — from public-finance reporting to urban environment to forest policy — illustrates the publication's commitment to covering the machinery of governance rather than only its outcomes.

Earlier coverage has tackled some of the most consequential questions in Indian development: the economics of larger firms as a growth strategy, the enforcement of securities laws, spatial approaches to human rights in urban India, street design and climate, generations of economic reform, decentralised disaster response, and the demand for real citizen participation in governance. The publication's government section alone stretches back through two decades of analysis on cities, public funds, law and order and institutional reform.

Understanding Kashmir and special projects

India Together has periodically undertaken major editorial projects beyond its regular sections. One notable example is its "Understanding Kashmir" series, which set out to collate credible public-domain information on the Indian state's policy and record in Jammu and Kashmir — including a chronology of the conflict, the story of elections in Kashmir, evidence regarding allegations of human-rights violations, and assessments of proposed solutions — with the stated aim of helping readers critically analyse India's policies with a view to ending the bloodshed. Such projects exemplify the publication's belief that patient, evidence-based journalism can inform even the most emotive debates.

Editorial leadership

Ashwin Mahesh, who edits India Together, co-founded the publication with Subramaniam Vincent in 1998 and has guided it ever since. His dual identity as founder and editor has given the publication unusual continuity of editorial vision: the philosophy of "news in proportion," the fifteen-topic architecture and the rigorous review process all reflect a quarter-century of steady stewardship rather than the shifting priorities of successive managements. Under his editorship, the publication has moved from an independent online journal to a foundation-supported public-interest outlet without abandoning its original mission.

Role in Indian media

In the landscape of Indian journalism, India Together is a proof of concept: that a development-focused, depth-first, non-commercial publication can survive and remain relevant for more than twenty-five years. It has served as a training ground and platform for freelance reporters, a reference for scholars and policymakers, and a model for the community-funded journalism now being built by its own parent foundation. At a time when much of Indian media chases speed and scale, India Together continues to argue — by example — that what the country's public life most needs is news in proportion.