Grievance Redressal

Your right to complain

Peoples Feed is a publisher of news and current affairs content in India. That means we are covered by Part III of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, made under the Information Technology Act, 2000.

Those Rules give any person aggrieved by content we have published the right to complain, and they give us duties with a clock attached. This page sets out exactly how to complain, who receives it, how fast we must reply, and what to do if you are not satisfied with our answer.

Effective from 11 September 2026.

Our Grievance Officer

Rule 11 of the IT Rules, 2021 requires a publisher to establish a grievance redressal mechanism and to appoint a Grievance Officer based in India who is responsible for the redressal of grievances received, and to publish the contact details.

The Grievance Officer is a real person who reads every grievance personally. Please use email wherever you can, because it creates a timestamped record that the Rules require both of us to have.

The Code of Ethics we are measured against

Rule 10 of the IT Rules, 2021 applies a Code of Ethics to publishers of news and current affairs content. In substance, that Code requires us to observe:

• The Norms of Journalistic Conduct framed by the Press Council of India under the Press Council Act, 1978.
• The Programme Code under section 5 of the Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act, 1995.
• A prohibition on publishing content that is prohibited under any law for the time being in force.

Our own Editorial Policy, Fact-Checking Policy and Public Corrections Policy set standards that in several places go further than the Code requires, particularly on sourcing, the right of reply and writing about living people. You may complain about a breach of either the Code or our own published policies.

The three-tier mechanism

The Rules create a three-tier structure. A complaint starts at Level 1 and moves up only if it is not resolved.

Level 1: self-regulation by the publisher, which is us. Rule 11.

You complain to us. Our Grievance Officer registers the grievance, acknowledges it within 24 hours and takes a decision within 15 days.

Level 2: the self-regulating body of publishers. Rule 12.

A self-regulating body constituted by publishers. Under Rule 12 such a body must be headed by a retired judge of the Supreme Court or a High Court, or by an independent eminent person from the field of media, broadcasting, entertainment, child rights, human rights or another relevant field, and may have other members not exceeding six, who are experts in those fields. It must register itself with the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.

Its job is to oversee its members’ adherence to the Code of Ethics, to hear appeals from complainants who are not satisfied with a publisher’s decision, and to address grievances the publisher has not resolved within the 15-day period. It must decide within 15 days.

Level 3: the oversight mechanism of the Central Government. Rules 13 and 14.

The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting operates the oversight tier. Under Rule 13 the Ministry publishes a charter for self-regulating bodies including codes of practice, constitutes an Inter-Departmental Committee, and appoints an officer of the Ministry as the Authorised Officer for the purposes of the Rules.

Under Rule 14 the Inter-Departmental Committee consists of representatives of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, the Ministry of Women and Child Development, the Ministry of Law and Justice, the Ministry of Home Affairs, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, the Ministry of External Affairs and the Ministry of Defence, along with such other Ministries, organisations and domain experts as the Ministry may include. The Committee hears complaints about violation of the Code of Ethics that reach the oversight tier, and makes recommendations to the Ministry.

How to file a grievance with us

Send an email to grievance@peoplesfeed.in with the subject line “Grievance”. Please include all of these, because a grievance missing any of them takes longer to resolve:

1. Your name and contact details, including an email address we can reply to. Anonymous grievances cannot be processed under the Rules, because we cannot acknowledge or decide them to anybody.
2. The full URL of the article, image, video, caption or comment you are complaining about.
3. The exact content you are complaining about, copied and pasted or described precisely, including which paragraph or which line.
4. What your grievance is: what you say is wrong with it and, where you can, which part of the Code of Ethics or which of our published policies you say it breaches.
5. Any documents that support your position, or links to them.
6. What you are asking for: a correction, a clarification, a right of reply published, a removal, or an apology. Tell us what outcome you want.
7. Your relationship to the content, if any: are you the subject, their representative, or a reader.

The timelines the Rules impose on us

What happens inside the 15 days

1. Registration. The grievance is logged with a date, a reference number and the URL complained of.
2. Acknowledgement. You receive the reference number within 24 hours.
3. Review. The Grievance Officer reads the article, pulls the internal verification record for it, re-opens every source cited, and checks the right of reply record.
4. Your evidence. We read every document you sent. If we need something more, we will write and ask, and we will tell you the deadline we are working to.
5. The reporter’s account. The reporter who wrote the piece is asked to account for the disputed passage and to produce the source. The reporter does not decide the grievance.
6. Decision. One of: upheld in full, upheld in part, or not upheld. You are told which, in writing, with reasons.
7. Action. Where a grievance is upheld, we act under the Public Corrections Policy: a clarification, a correction at the top of the article, a right of reply published in the article, or a retraction at the same URL. Where we have caused harm, we apologise, and we say so on the page rather than in private.
8. Escalation information. Every decision letter tells you how to escalate and by when.

What we will and will not do

• We will correct anything factually wrong, as soon as it is shown to be wrong, and mark the change on the article.
• We will publish your reply in the article, in the same section as the claim, where a right of reply was owed and not obtained.
• We will retract an article whose central claim was wrong, at the same URL, with a notice explaining what happened.
• We will remove content that is unlawful, that breaches a person’s privacy, that identifies a child in a protected context, or that we cannot substantiate.
• We will not remove an accurate, lawfully published, properly sourced article because the subject would prefer it did not exist. Reporting a true and properly sourced fact about a person’s public or professional conduct is journalism, and we will defend it.
• We will not take down an article in response to a threat rather than an argument. Send us the document that shows we are wrong and we will act on it the same day.
• We will not delete an article quietly. If it goes, a notice stays at the URL.

If you are not satisfied with our decision

Level 2

Under Rule 10(3) of the IT Rules, 2021, if you are not satisfied with our decision, or if we fail to decide within 15 days, you may appeal to the self-regulating body of which the publisher is a member, within 15 days of receiving our decision. That body must decide within 15 days.

Our current position, stated plainly. Peoples Feed began publishing on 11 September 2026. As at the date at the foot of this page, Peoples Feed is not yet a member of a self-regulating body registered with the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting under Rule 12. We are seeking membership of a registered body. The moment membership is confirmed, the name of that body, the name of the person who heads it and its complaint address will be published in this section. In the meantime, no complainant is left without a route: you may take an unresolved grievance directly to the oversight mechanism at Level 3, described below, and we will forward our complete file on the grievance to the Ministry on request.

Level 3

The oversight mechanism is operated by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, under Rules 13 and 14. A grievance that remains unresolved at Levels 1 and 2, or that is referred to the Ministry, may be considered by the Inter-Departmental Committee constituted by the Ministry, which makes recommendations to the Ministry.

Complaints to the Ministry may be filed through the Government of India’s grievance portal for digital media under the IT Rules, 2021, and through the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting’s published contact channels. We will supply you with our full record of the grievance for that purpose on request, at no charge.

Other routes that remain open to you

Nothing on this page takes away any other right you have. You may still approach the Press Council of India, a consumer forum, or a court of competent jurisdiction. If your complaint concerns your personal data, you may approach the Data Protection Board of India under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023. See our Privacy Policy.

Monthly disclosure of grievances received and disposed of

Rule 18 of the IT Rules, 2021 requires a publisher to furnish details of its entity to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, and to publish a periodic compliance report every month setting out the details of grievances received and the action taken on them. We publish that report here, updated monthly, and we do not remove past months.

We also publish every correction and retraction we issue in the log on our Public Corrections Policy page, which as at this date records no corrections issued to date.

Frivolous and abusive complaints

We treat every grievance seriously and we investigate it properly. We will, however, record and decline repeated complaints that raise the same point after it has been decided, complaints that are an attempt to suppress accurate reporting, and complaints that are abusive or threatening towards our staff. Where a complaint is declined on that basis, we say so in writing and we still tell you how to escalate, because the decision on escalation is not ours to make.

Summary of contacts

Effective date: 11 September 2026
Last updated: 11 September 2026