Authorities Must Protect Journalists’ Rights In India

Authorities Must Protect Journalists’ Rights After Indian Media Group Meltdown

The International Federation of Journalists joins affiliates and partners in India in urging the authorities to take all necessary steps to protect the rights of journalists retrenched after a media group promoted by a finance company in the eastern Indian metropolis of Kolkata declared insolvency and shut down.

On March 26, journalists and other employees at a number of media companies promoted by the Saradha group – a finance and real estate operator based in Kolkata – were told that all operations would cease on April 1. Most of the seven hundred journalists who work in these media companies had not been paid their salaries since January.

The closures affected no fewer than four daily newspapers ­– the Bengal Post and Seven Sisters Post in English, Azad Hind in Urdu and Prabhat Varta in Hindi – along with weekly magazines in Bengali and Urdu, and a number of news and entertainment channels.

These abrupt closures though not entirely unanticipated, followed the meltdown of a company that had mobilised savings from across the state with assurances of healthy returns – and then ventured into influence peddling by buying up a number of media assets.

The IFJ learns that some among the younger journalists who were laid off with the collapse of the Saradha group have obtained alternate employment at much lower salaries, though the more senior and experienced hands still remain unemployed.

The state government of West Bengal has launched a fiscal rescue package to restore the savings of the thousands of investors who suffered from the Saradha meltdown.

The IFJ urges that due attention be paid to the needs of the journalists and other employees of the group, at least in terms of meeting the backlog of their salaries and paying them retrenchment compensation as mandated by law.

“We see the Saradha group meltdown and the collapse of its extensive media holdings as a consequence of a very poor system of regulation”, said the IFJ Asia-Pacific.

“Journalists and other workers in the media should not be asked to pay the penalty for the failures of the media regulatory apparatus in India”.

ENDS

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