Editorial policy

How articles are made

IndiaFocal's articles are written by an automated editorial engine, not by a newsroom of reporters typing up their own copy. For each article, the engine:

1. drafts the piece from cited, published sources — government releases, wire reports, and other published reporting;
2. translates it into English by machine — today, every article originates in Hindi;
3. publishes it with one of the three labels below, describing how much it has been checked.

The engine writes only from the sources it cites. That is not a promise that every claim in every article is correct — it's exactly why the automated claims-check exists, to catch statements that don't hold up against those sources, and why articles carry the labels below instead of one blanket promise.

Translation

Every article on IndiaFocal today begins as Hindi-language reporting, and is translated into English by machine, not by a human translator. Every article currently carries this line: “Translated from the Hindi original · translation AI-generated”. When IndiaFocal begins publishing reporting written in English from the start, only translated articles will carry this disclosure — original English reporting won't need it.

That disclosure means exactly what it says: the original reporting was done in Hindi, and what you're reading is an AI translation of it — not an independent piece of reporting written in English. Translated articles carry a link across to the Hindi original on Manthan News, so you can read the source version.

The three labels

Every article on IndiaFocal carries exactly one of three labels, and each label describes that one article only — never the site as a whole.

Editorially verified appears only when a human editor has read and approved the article in its original language, before or at the moment of publication. It is never applied by software. If you see this label, a person put it there.

Claims checked against sources means an automated reviewer re-checked every factual claim in the article against real, cited sources. That is a genuine check — the claims have been verified — but no person read the article as a whole before it went out. This label is deliberately not the green Editorially verified seal, and the two should not be read as equivalent.

AI-generated · review pending is the default state: the article was written by the engine and published, and no review — human or automated — has happened yet.

We will never apply the green seal without a human editor's sign-off, and we will never describe automated review as editorial review. If an article doesn't carry Editorially verified, no one at IndiaFocal is claiming a person read it.

Images

Images work under the same rule as text: nothing is presented as something it isn't.

• An image the engine generated carries the caption “AI-generated illustration” wherever it appears.
• A stock or file photo used to illustrate a story it doesn't literally depict is captioned “Representative image”, with a photo credit where we have one.

Neither kind of image is presented as a photograph taken at the scene described in the article.

Corrections

If you find something wrong in an article — a fact, a name, a figure — tell us. Email corrections@indiafocal.com with the article link and what's wrong. Our policy is to fix the article itself once a correction is confirmed, and to note on it that a correction was made — not to quietly edit it and say nothing.