Matters India

About Matters India

Matters India is a New Delhi-based news portal reporting on Indian current affairs with a focus on social justice and community issues. Launched in March 2013, it is an online news service that concentrates on local news from every corner of India, covering Church, religious, sociopolitical and national life with particular attention to the poor, the marginalised and the voiceless. It was founded by veteran journalist Jose Kavi, who serves as its editor-in-chief. Its official website is mattersindia.com.

Overview

Matters India describes itself as an online news portal concentrating on local news from every nook and corner of India — a publication started in 2013 by like-minded and concerned journalists who believed in telling the stories of ordinary and voiceless Indians. Supported by an entirely voluntary team of professional journalists, the portal has become a distinctive voice in Indian religious and social journalism: independent of Church hierarchy control, professional in standards, and anchored in grassroots reporting from across the country's states.

The service completed thirteen years of publication on 19 March 2026, marking more than a decade of continuous operation. It publishes daily news, analysis and opinion, with correspondents and contributors filing from New Delhi and from cities and towns across India — and from correspondents abroad in places such as Chicago and Manila — on matters ranging from Catholic Church affairs and interfaith issues to national politics, civil-society campaigns, women's rights, justice and human rights.

Founding: March 2013

Matters India was launched in March 2013 by Jose Kavi together with a group of journalists living in different parts of India. Kavi had just left the Union of Catholic Asian News (UCAN), the Bangkok-headquartered Christian news agency that is Asia's leading Catholic wire service, where he had headed the India operation for twenty-five years until December 2012. During his tenure he had built a countrywide network of reporters who provided authentic and accurate news from the grassroots.

The timing of the launch was significant: March 2013 was also the month Pope Francis was elected, and commentators within the portal's community noted that the new pontiff's arrival brought revolutionary changes within the Catholic Church — paralleling, in their view, the birth of Matters India as a platform for free expression for writers and thinkers. Kavi's stated purpose was to provide an alternative news forum for the poor and the downtrodden — journalism that would give voice to those whom mainstream media routinely ignores.

Editorial mission

The portal's mission is captured in its name: what matters, today, is reported from the perspective of those to whom it matters most. Matters India concentrates on the issues of Church, religious and sociopolitical life in the country and the wider world, but it does so through the lens of social justice. Its coverage regularly features trend-setting experiments by religious and lay people of all faiths, alongside reporting on movements for women's rights, Dalit and Adivasi concerns, communal harmony, education and healthcare access.

A defining feature of the publication is its editorial independence. As one of its anniversary commentators observed, while several Catholic publications suffer from control and censorship by the hierarchy and religious superiors, Matters India is free to practise fearless journalism. The team's long years of experience in other publications gives the portal a professional polish that distinguishes it from amateur advocacy outlets: it aims to be genuinely impartial news and views, not a house organ.

Citizen journalism

Matters India has been a pioneer in promoting citizen journalism in religious news reporting. The portal actively invites ordinary citizens — the aam aadmi — to contribute: anyone with a nose for news is encouraged to write reports on happenings in their area and send them for publication. Its citizen-journalism programme frames participation as an act of non-professionals collecting, reporting, analysing and disseminating news and information, with the goal of providing the independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information that a multi-religious and pluralistic democratic society requires.

The initiative opens the news process to readers in two ways: they can contribute reports themselves, and they can comment on current issues and published items. By doing so, Matters India hopes to empower citizens directly — turning the audience from passive consumers into active participants in the news ecosystem, particularly in the religious and community reporting where professional media coverage is thinnest.

Coverage areas

The portal's national coverage follows the major currents of Indian public life: electoral integrity and voter rights, civil-society campaigns against restrictive legislation, youth movements and protests, education policy and exam reform. Its October 2026 reporting included the Catholic Bishops' Conference of India's warning against disenfranchisement amid a special intensive revision of electoral rolls, and a civil-society coalition's memorandum to a parliamentary committee on the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Amendment Bill. July 2026 coverage reported on the women's-reservation debate in Parliament, a Gandhian protest by innovator Sonam Wangchuk at Jantar Mantar over exam-paper leaks, and student suicides linked to the cancelled NEET medical entrance examination.

Religious and Church affairs form the portal's core beat: episcopal appointments, women's leadership in the Church, Catholic digital evangelisation across Asia, centenary tributes to Adivasi Christian leaders, and the global Church's engagement with India. Its human-rights and justice coverage follows cases of communal violence, the fate of prisoners convicted in high-profile cases, and campaigns for judicial reform — reporting that frequently foregrounds Dalit, Adivasi, minority and women's perspectives.

Team and leadership

Jose Kavi has edited Matters India since its inception in 2013, serving as editor-in-chief. In March 2026, as the service entered its fourteenth year, it appointed a new managing editor: Ivan Fernandes, a journalist with more than three decades of experience in international media, who assumed office on 21 March 2026, two days after the portal completed thirteen years. Fernandes, a former seminarian of the Calcutta Jesuit province, began his journalism career as a reporter for The Herald, the weekly published by the Archdiocese of Calcutta, and reported for UCAN while a philosophy student in Chennai.

Fernandes brings more than two decades of experience leading UCAN's main editorial desk and nearly ten years as managing editor of La Croix International to the role, along with what the portal describes as deep editorial expertise, an international perspective and a firm commitment to journalistic integrity. His stated priority is to take Matters India to the next level by enhancing and nurturing a grassroots network of citizen journalists — a direct continuation of the portal's founding emphasis on ground-level reporting.

Jose Kavi: the editor

Jose Kavi is one of the most experienced Catholic journalists in India. He began his journalism career in 1982 as an in-service trainee with South Asian Religious News, based in New Delhi, where besides reporting and editing stories he headed its training wing, Editaids. In 1986 he joined United News of India, one of the country's two leading secular news agencies, where he worked for nearly four years. He was then recruited by Maryknoll Father Robert Astorino, the founder-director of the Union of Catholic Asian News, to start UCAN's India operation — a role he held for a quarter of a century, building it into the country's principal source of grassroots Catholic news.

Kavi's work has been recognised internationally. In 2015 he won the best feature award for features published in Catholic periodicals of the United States — one of twelve awards given by ONE, the multimedia magazine of the Catholic Near East Welfare Association — for his contributions to ONE magazine. A former Jesuit seminarian, he has spent more than four decades in journalism, and his founding of Matters India at the age of sixty marked not a retirement but a new beginning: an independent newsroom built on everything he had learned about grassroots reporting.

Recent coverage and relevance

Matters India's recent publishing record demonstrates the breadth of its current operation. In the autumn of 2026 it reported on the Church's engagement with electoral-roll revisions, civil-society opposition to foreign-funding legislation, and the first Asian Catholic Digital Missionary Assembly at Radio Veritas Asia in Manila. Its July 2026 coverage included feminist activists' demands on women's reservation, the Catholic women religious' solidarity with protesting youth at Jantar Mantar, and reporting on the likely release of the prime convict in the 1999 murder of Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two sons — coverage that reflects the portal's willingness to follow difficult stories in full.

The portal's international reach is also evident: its contributors file from Chicago on the Syro-Malabar diaspora, from Bengaluru on artificial intelligence and democratic futures, and from Manila on Asian Church affairs, giving it a genuinely global reporting footprint for a publication rooted in Indian grassroots journalism.

Identity and significance

Thirteen years after its founding, Matters India stands as a distinctive institution in Indian journalism: a professionally edited, editorially independent news portal serving the intersection of faith, social justice and public life. Its significance lies in what it proves is possible — that a voluntary team of professional journalists, rooted in grassroots networks and committed to the voiceless, can sustain a national news service outside both commercial media and institutional Church control. True to its name, it continues to insist that what matters in India is what happens to ordinary Indians — and to report it, day after day, from every corner of the country.