India Together

Audience
India Together provides information and news on issues that matter to discerning readers. Stories and articles are categorized over 15 major developmental topics, and also over the states of India. Because of a simple, easy-to-access website and the exclusive focus on the public interest and development, readers go away feeling they’ve been informed by an intense but well designed magazine. Equally, also provide help developmental and policy experts, academicians and scholars and leading journalists take their ideas, research and public interest concerns expeditiously to a broad and interested national and global audience.

Readership
From a few thousand readers per month in 2001, India Together reached an online readership of 10000 visitors in 2002, 25,000 in mid 2004 and was counting around 30000 visitors per month in December 2004. The fortnightly newsletter goes out to over 3500 subscribers as of December 2004, and is growing every day. As of mid 2007 the website was logging approximately 110,000 visitors each month, and readership has grown steadily for the past three years at about 35 percent annually.

Editors
The editors of India Together are ever accessible to authors and readers and interact with them as partners with timeliness and professionalism. Every item on the website is categorized so that specialist readers can access information in their favourite issue pages, while general readers can access the latest from the front pages and regional pages.

Goal
It is continuing goal to ensure that India Together will inform on development and policy issues with expertise, public interest focus, content packaging, and non- profit operational transparency of the highest standards.

Subramaniam Vincent co founder says:
Hello and welcome. I am a co-founder of India Together and one of the lead editors of this publication. I believe that an original purpose of journalism is to cover society in proportion to its many realities and provide information to citizens so that they may be free and self-governing.

Aswin Mahesh co founder says:
Hello and welcome to my homepage. I am a co-founder of India Together and one of its lead editors. I am interested in the potential of information and communication, coupled with technology and management, to promote the public good in India. Most of my writing on these pages is in the form of editorials I have written with my friend and fellow lead editor, Subramaniam Vincent.

Reader funded
India Together is a public interest reader financed online magazine published by Civil Society Information Exchange Private Ltd, Bangalore. Because the maximisation of revenue in itself is not an objective, it is envisaged to use revenues to increase our coverage of public interest issues, and to broaden the range of ways in which content is packaged for the audience.

Independence
While it is possible to fund much of the work through either a required subscription fee or from commercial advertising revenues, reader funding helps keep the editorial independence, and allows editors the luxury of not having to run non serious content (such as entertainment or sport) that would dilute the focus on important issues.

Visit: India Together

Comments
Accounts
An excellent website, but what caught my attention is the display of its yearly financial accounts. This is really unique and a trendsetter for others to emulate. The Armed Forces has so many Welfare organisations in public domain and functioning under The Societies Registration Act 1860 (non profit organistions). Seldom we get to know either the financial accounts (sources of income and expenditure) or the beneficiaries. It should be made mandatory under the RTI Act to have accounts of all welfare organisations Registered under the Society Act 1860 to be transparent and display the yearly finanicial income, sources and expenditure.