Truth vs Hype

In a blazing hot rally in Salem, Tamil Nadu, Jayalalithaa told a massive gathering all that she has done, or given to them in her past five years: an endless list of election freebies. Using that rally as a starting point, we analyse whether the "mixer-grinder" competitive populism of Tamil Nadu's main parties is degrading its political culture, and its economy.

India is in one of the worst droughts in recent memory. But is the crisis entirely because of rain gods, or is there also a man-made dimension? On Truth vs Hype, we report from Marathwada, India's drought central, and from across the country to trace the three big reasons why official incompetence may have worsened the impact of drought 2016.

This week, the government announced that one billion Indians had been enrolled into Aadhaar, a major landmark for the Unique Identity scheme. Using a mix of data and ground reportage, we investigate whether the claims that Aadhaar will ensure smoother, corruption-free delivery of government services matches the ground realities. And whether the supposed benefits of Aadhaar outweigh concerns over data privacy.

This week, Maoists struck Chhattisgarh with a deadly intent at a time when the state appears to have the upper hand. Over the past year, the police have claimed a big spike in arrests, surrenders and killings of Maoists. But anyone who tried to question the claims of security forces - journalists, activists, lawyers - have been arrested, intimidated, or forced out of Bastar. This week, we investigate if the war against Maoists is being used to stifle dissent and shrink civil liberties.

For the media, the public and the policymakers, Vijay Mallya has become the face of bank fraud. But in the balance sheets of India's biggest government banks are many more Mallyas who owe similar amounts of money, running into crores.Except you would have never heard of them. This week we investigate the big invisible defaulters of the Indian banking system, and how their modus operandi exposes the rot within.

On the face of it, the case of Vijay Mallya is on one hand of a businessman who claims he is a victim of bad economic policies, too bankrupt to pay his dues, on the other of banks who claim that despite their best efforts they lost crores of money, and of a political establishment that claims they have zero tolerance for defaulters, no matter how well connected. But as we shall see this week, no one comes out clean in the murky waters of the Mallya financial empire.

The encounter of Ishrat Jehan and three others has once again hit the headlines. If earlier, the BJP was under fire, accused by CBI of a fake encounter. Now it's the Congress on backfoot, with more and more voices coming forward to claim the UPA government had tampered with information related to the case, particularly to bury Ishrat's links with the Lashkar-e-Taiba. The deluge of information is confusing, and so this week we sift the facts from the propaganda of the Ishrat encounter.

Demands for Jat reservation that degenerate into violence are not new, but what Haryana witnessed over the past week was an unprecedented degree of rioting. This week we travel to the epicenter of the violence - Rohtak and Jhajhhar - to investigate how changing power equations, political and police incompetence and the shifting economies of country side all come together in a combustible mix.

On Truth vs Hype this week, we cut through the fog of claims and counterclaims in the row over the Jawaharlal Nehru University where a student leader was arrested under charges of sedition over a controversial event to commemorate 2002 Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru. (Video courtesy: Zee News)

This week we investigate the darker side of India's real estate boom - this phenomenon of thousands of potential home-owners left stranded by builders with half complete or poorly-built apartments. It's a malaise not specific to the National Capital Region, but the NCR is the worst manifestation of it compared to anywhere in India. Since it's not possible to focus on every single developer, we have zeroed in on the key players, the ones who face the most complaints about their projects. We try to understand the root causes: is it as the developers claim, mainly because of delayed clearances, and the economic downturn, or is it malpractice?