Press Council Of India Gains 13 Nominated Journalists
The central government has reconstituted the Press Council of India, nominating 13 members from the working journalist community in a notification issued by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.
- Body: the Press Council of India, headed by Justice Ranjana Prakash Desai (retd)
- Nominated: 13 members from the working journalist community, six editors and seven in non-editorial roles
- Under: the Press Council Act, 1978
- Existing membership: 14 members, including five Members of Parliament, six representatives of newspaper owners and three experts
Who Joins The Press Council Of India
The nominees in the working journalists' editors category are Pradeep Kumar Jain, Sayed Raza Husain Rizvi, Ankur Dua, Aparna Shukla, Raj Parwana or Narender Singh as the notification lists that seat, and Vinod Bajpai.
The seven representing working journalists other than editors are Vinod Kohli, Geetartha Pathak, Prajnananda Chaudhuri, Kingshuk Pramanik, C K Nayak, Prasanna Kumar Mohanty and Bijoy Kakchingtabam.
The notification cites clause (a) of sub-section (3) and sub-section (5) of Section 5, read with sub-section (1) of Section 6 of the Act.
What The Council Actually Does
Established under the Press Council Act, 1978, it is a statutory autonomous body mandated to preserve press freedom and maintain standards in newspapers and news agencies. It sits at the centre of India's press self-regulation framework.
Its powers are narrower than its remit sounds: it can censure, it can adjudicate complaints, and its authority rests substantially on the weight its findings carry rather than on enforcement.
Why The Composition Is The Story
A body whose main instrument is a published finding depends entirely on who is doing the finding. The three existing expert seats represent the Bar Council of India, the University Grants Commission and the Sahitya Akademi, alongside parliamentarians and owners' representatives.
Adding 13 working journalists shifts the balance of a council that has to adjudicate between the interests of proprietors and the people they employ. Whether that changes anything in practice is a question the next set of rulings will answer rather than this notification. More industry news.