Live India

Live India is an Indian Hindi TV channel owned by Broadcast Initiatives Ltd., focusing on news and commentary. It was earlier known as "Janmat", when it was focused on "views"; now the channel is sometimes calledhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SandboxsandboxLive India (Janmat).

In a Rs. 400 million upgrade in August 2007, it opened news bureaus at Srinagar,
Chandigarh, Bhopal, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Bhubaneswar,
Kolkata and Guwahati as well as its earlier offices at Mumbai and Delhi.

Sudhir Chaudhary is the CEO of Live India.

choolteacher sending girl students into prostitution 'expose'

On August 28 2007, the channel aired a sting operation covering a porn racket run by a schoolteacher in Delhi involving school girls. A lady in Vivek Vihar, where the teacher Uma Khurana used to teach at a girl's school, gavethe lead to the channel, after which the reporter, acting as a customer,fixed up a meeting withMrs. Khurana at Cross River mall in late August. The footage aired shows Khurana negotiating adeal of Rs. 4,000 for the girl’s “services”. He paid Rs. 400 to her and she handed over the 15-year-old girl, an ex-student at her earlier school [cite news
title = Sting op triggers riots in Old Delhi
author = Pratul Sharma & Neeraj Chauhan
publisher = Indian Express Delhi Newsline
url = http://cities.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=253700
date = August 31, 2007
accessdate = 2007-09-01] . Later, the girl was taken into confidence, and revealed that Khurana's method was to serve the students a drink laced with drugs [cite news
title = Delhi scarred by TV sting operations
publisher = Times of India
url = http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Delhi_scarred_by_TV_sting_operations/articleshow/2325014.cms
date = 31 August 2007
accessdate = 2007-09-01] after which she would take pictures of them in an obscene pose. These were later used by her to blackmail students into prostitution.

The day following the broadcast, a crowd of several hundred people gathered at the school. After burning a police van parked nearby, they entered the school premises, pulled the teacher out of the teacher's room, and thrashed her badly.

This led tocalls for sting operations being curtailed. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, which has been trying to stifle sting operations, especially against politicians,said that “Itshould have been left to the police to take action against the accused.” [cite news
title = Sting revives debate on content
author = Chetan Chauhan
publisher = Hindustan Times
url = http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?id=4aee34a0-177a-4432-b9be-4748cce88c4d&&Headline=TV+sting+shows+schoolteacher+in+%e2%80%98porn+racket%e2%80%99
date = August 31, 2007
accessdate = 2007-09-01]

Meanwhile, the role of Live India, the channel which aired the sting is being scrutinised by the police. The police had arrested, Khurana, a teacher at the Government Sarvodaya Kanya Vidyalaya's Daryaganj branch, after the mob violence on Thursday.

But the police and parents claim that the channel's approach in broadcasting the expose was wrong. It is believed the channel had conducted the sting over a month back, when Khurana was a teacher at the Vivek Vihar branch of the school. [cite news
title = Cops helpless in school scandal case
author = Puneet Nicholas Yadav
publisher = DNA - India
url = http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?NewsID=1119070
date = September 1, 2007
accessdate = 2007-09-01]

ting unravels

On September 6, the investigating police team revealed that thegirl shown in the video was not Khurana's student, but a reporter with a small Noida newspaper, Rashmi Singh [cite news
title = Sex scam: Crime Branch arrests 'schoolgirl'
publisher = NDTV
url = http://www.ndtv.com/convergence/ndtv/story.aspx?id=NEWEN20070025291

date = September 7, 2007 (New Delhi)
accessdate = 2007-09-07] , who acted the role at the instance of the Live Indiareporter Prakash Singh who initially broke the story. The Hindustan Times quoted Live India’s CEO Sudhir Choudhury as saying that the contention that Rashmi was neither a prostitute nor aschoolgirl does not absolve Khurana of her crime. “In almost all suchoperations, reporters assume fake identities to carry out the stingeffectively. Our job is to give an idea and not provide full evidence.” [cite news
title = When’s a sting not a sting?
author = Abhishek Bhalla and Ravi Bajpai
publisher = Hindustan Times
url = http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?id=c535cf85-7eb1-428f-9a33-976f907f461b&ParentID=a325b0ab-6ee7-4532-b8c9-1203db2e1226&&Headline=When%e2%80%99s+a+sting+not+a+sting%3f
date = September 7, 2007]

Court Verdict

On Wednesday, 12 September 2007, The high court in the Indian capital, Delhi, has ordered that a schoolteacher who was sacked after a fake television "sting" operation must be reinstated. A police investigation later revealed the sting had been faked and the teacher falsely accused. The undercover journalist, Prakash Singh, who made the report was arrested. Police later questioned staff at the Live India news channel which broadcast the secretly-filmed tape on 30 August. Announcing her bail, the judge said she had been "more of a victim than an offender". [

cite news
title = Cops helpless in school scandal case
author = Ninad Thakur
publisher = BBC News
url = http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6991054.stm
date = September 13, 2007
accessdate = 2007-09-13]

Government Ban

The Indian Government banned the channel for a month due to the false sting. It was banned because it breached the Cable Networks Regulation Act, 1995, by broadcasting an admittedly doctored sting operation. [cite news
title = India bans faked report channel
author = Jyotsna Singh
publisher = BBC News
url = http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7005185.stm
date = September 21, 2007
accessdate = 2007-09-21]

References

External links

* [http://www.liveindia.com/news/07sep07a.html Action Against Live India News channel]