Every spring, one number travels around the world faster than the report that produced it. Reporters Without Borders publishes its World Press Freedom Index, a country falls or rises a few places, headlines are written, governments either celebrate or fume, and the conversation moves on. India watches this ritual with particular unease. In 2025 it sat at 151 out of 180; in 2026 it slipped to 157. Year after year, it lands below countries whose press most observers would not, on reflection, call freer.

This is not an argument that press freedom in India is in robust health. It is not. Journalists are jailed, sued into silence, and in some cases killed. Anyone who cares about the press should take that seriously. But caring about press freedom is exactly why the instrument we use to measure it deserves scrutiny. A flawed thermometer does not mean the patient is well. It means we cannot trust the reading — and a reading we cannot trust is a poor basis for either complacency or alarm.

The intent behind the Index is unimpeachable. The methodology behind it is not. This piece is about the gap between the two.

What the Index actually is

Reporters Without Borders — RSF, from the French Reporters sans frontières — is a Paris-based non-profit founded in 1985, with consultative status at the United Nations and UNESCO. Its annual Index assigns every country a score from 0 to 100 and ranks all 180 against one another. That score rests on two components, and understanding the difference between them is the whole game.

The first component is a quantitative tally of abuses: killings, imprisonments, attacks and other documented acts of violence against journalists and media outlets during the calendar year. RSF’s in-house regional researchers, supported by a correspondent network, keep this count. This part of the Index is concrete. It points to events that happened, to names and dates. It is the half of the Index you can, in principle, audit.

The second component is a qualitative analysis built from a questionnaire. RSF sends a long survey — roughly 80-plus questions in recent editions, translated into 25 languages — to what it calls “press freedom specialists”: journalists, academics, lawyers and human rights defenders. Their answers are scored across five indicators: political context, legal framework, economic context, sociocultural context, and safety. This is the half of the Index that produces most of the controversy, because it converts opinion into apparently precise numbers.

RSF deserves credit for one piece of methodological care here. It calculates the final score so that a country cannot earn a high ranking simply by being quiet. As RSF’s own documentation puts it, the method “prevents an inappropriately low score being given to a country where few or no acts of violence against journalists take place because the provision of news and information is tightly controlled.” In other words, RSF knows that silence is not the same as freedom. The problem, as we will see, is that this safeguard does not fully solve the deeper structural issues — and in some respects it cannot.

Flaw one: the questionnaire asks questions that cannot be cleanly answered

A measurement is only as good as the questions it is built from. And the WPFI questionnaire is full of items that sound objective but are not.

Consider a question of the kind RSF uses: Does the media report the negative side of government policies? It seems like a clean test of watchdog journalism. It is not. A “yes” does suggest a free and adversarial press. But a “no” is genuinely ambiguous. It could mean the state suppresses criticism — or it could mean a particular outlet is politically aligned with the government by its own choice, or that the respondent happens to consume media that does not criticise. The question cannot distinguish state coercion from editorial alignment from the respondent’s own media diet. Three completely different realities collapse into the same data point.

This is not a stray example. India’s own NITI Aayog, the government’s policy think tank, published an analysis making exactly this point: the questionnaire is structurally limited. It asks whether private media companies exist and whether they can set their editorial line, but it asks little or nothing about media ownership concentration or the economic structure behind those companies. A questionnaire that cannot see who owns the press cannot fully see how free the press is.

There is a second, subtler problem with question design: every question and sub-question, within each indicator, is weighted equally. A question about the physical murder of journalists and a question about, say, the tone of political discourse toward the press can carry the same arithmetic weight inside their indicator. Equal weighting is administratively convenient, but it is an editorial choice disguised as neutrality. It assumes all dimensions of press freedom matter the same amount, which no working journalist actually believes.

And because the questionnaire is a perception survey, it inevitably measures perceived conditions. Perception is not nothing — fear and self-censorship are real and worth measuring — but perception is shaped by a respondent’s politics, their location, the outlets they read, and the mood of the year. When you convert perception into a score with two decimal places, you lend it a precision the underlying data never had.

Flaw two: nobody knows who is answering — or how many

Here is the single most serious problem, and it is one RSF has never adequately addressed: the respondents are anonymous, unaccountable, and few.

RSF does not publish who fills in its questionnaire. It does not disclose, for any given country, how many people responded, where they live, what outlets they work for, what their political orientation is, what their relationship is to the region being assessed, or how they were selected. The Al Jazeera Media Institute, reviewing the Index, noted precisely this: RSF withholds the number of respondents per country, their geographical distribution, their professional affiliations and the criteria used to select them — making it impossible to judge whether the sample is diverse, independent, or contextually informed.

Now put a number on the sample. Independent analyses and RSF’s critics estimate that each country’s qualitative score may rest on the responses of fewer than 25 people — and in some assessments, far fewer. NITI Aayog’s analysis arrived at a startling figure: averaged out, the workload amounts to roughly one respondent providing a parameter-wise assessment for one country. Their conclusion was blunt — the implausibility of a single respondent accurately assessing press freedom across an entire nation renders the rankings, in their words, “highly subjective at best.”

Think about what this means for a country like India. A nation of 1.4 billion people, 28 states, two dozen major languages, and tens of thousands of newspapers, channels and digital outlets. The lived reality of a journalist in Srinagar, a journalist in Chennai, and a journalist in a Hindi-belt district town are not the same reality. No sample of a couple of dozen anonymous respondents — however well-intentioned — can represent that variation. The press freedom of a subcontinent is being inferred from a focus group.

Anonymity is defensible for one reason and one reason only: protecting respondents who would face danger if identified. That is legitimate, and in authoritarian states it is essential. But anonymity-for-safety does not require opacity about the sampling method. RSF could publish how many people responded, how they were distributed, and how they were chosen, without ever publishing a single name. It does not. And as NITI Aayog pointedly suggested, that reluctance to release even anonymized, parameter-wise country data invites the suspicion that the data would not survive scrutiny. When a body that exists to demand transparency from others will not be transparent about its own instrument, that is not a small irony. It is a credibility problem.

Flaw three: counting incidents without counting context

Now to the part of the Index that looks most solid — the abuses tally — because even the hard numbers are softer than they appear.

The abuses score counts incidents. It does not, in any meaningful way, normalise them. And without normalisation, raw incident counts are a deeply misleading basis for comparing countries.

Start with population and the size of the press corps. India has an enormous, combative, fragmented, fiercely competitive media sector. It produces an immense volume of journalism, much of it adversarial. A country with a vast press will, simply as a matter of arithmetic, generate more recorded incidents — more lawsuits, more arrests, more confrontations — than a country with a small or tightly controlled press. More journalists doing more adversarial work means more friction, and friction is what the abuses tally counts. A raw count rewards a small, docile press sector and penalises a large, restless one. That is the opposite of what the Index claims to want.

Consider the comparison that frustrates Indian readers most: a wealthy Gulf state ranking comfortably above India. In such a state, the press is small, often state-aligned or state-owned, and journalists rarely test the boundaries because the boundaries are clear and the consequences understood. Little adversarial journalism is attempted, so few incidents are recorded. The absence of incidents is read, at least partially, as the presence of freedom. India’s noisy, contested, litigious, dangerous-but-alive media environment generates a thick incident log precisely because so many people are pushing against so many limits.

RSF’s “lowest of two scores” safeguard is meant to catch this — to stop a silent country scoring well. It helps. But it is a blunt instrument. It can prevent the most egregious cases; it cannot finely correct for the fact that incident counts themselves are not comparable across countries of radically different size and media-sector scale. A safeguard at the top of the funnel does not fix unnormalised data flowing in at the bottom.

Then there is federalism and internal variation. A press freedom violation in one Indian state is one data point in a national score, even though India’s 28 states have very different records. A small, centralised country has one story to tell. India has dozens, and the Index flattens them into a single number, then ranks that number against the single number of a city-state. Comparing the press freedom of India to that of a small homogeneous country is, structurally, comparing a continent to a town and pretending the unit is the same.

None of this means the incidents are fake. Journalists are jailed and attacked in India, and each case is real and serious. The point is narrower and it is about comparison: an unnormalised incident count cannot fairly rank a 1.4-billion-person federal democracy with a sprawling private press against a small state with a compact, controlled one. The numerator is counted; the denominator is ignored.

Flaw four: one definition of press freedom for a very unidentical world

Underneath all of this sits a quieter assumption. The Index applies a single definition of press freedom, built largely around a Western liberal-democratic model of the press, to 180 countries with profoundly different histories, legal traditions, media economies and political cultures.

That is not automatically wrong — some things about press freedom genuinely are universal; a jailed journalist is a jailed journalist anywhere. But a single template will inevitably read some societies more accurately than others. RSF’s funding profile sharpens this concern: a substantial share of its budget comes from public and European institutional grants, and critics across Asia and Latin America have argued — fairly or not — that this embeds a Western frame of reference into what is presented as a neutral global measurement. RSF rejects the charge of bias, and independent media-rating bodies have generally found RSF factually reliable rather than propagandistic. But the structural point stands: a perception survey filtered through one model of the press, scored by an undisclosed sample, will carry the assumptions of its designers into its results.

What honest measurement would look like

The fix is not to abolish the Index or to dismiss it as a hit job. That reaction — common among governments that rank poorly — is just as lazy as accepting the number uncritically. The Index points at real things. India does have a serious, worsening press freedom problem, and RSF is right to say so.

The fix is to make the instrument worthy of the cause. Concretely, RSF could:

Publish the sampling methodology in full — how many respondents per country, their geographic and professional distribution, and the selection criteria — without ever publishing names. Transparency about method does not endanger anyone.

Release anonymised, parameter-level data so that independent researchers can test the rankings, exactly as NITI Aayog requested. A measurement that cannot be independently checked is an assertion, not a finding.

Normalise the abuses tally against the size of the country’s population and press sector, so that incident counts become genuinely comparable rather than quietly rewarding small or controlled media environments.

Rework the questionnaire so that ambiguous items — the ones where a “no” could mean three different things — are split into questions that isolate state coercion from editorial choice from respondent perception. And reconsider equal weighting, which treats the murder of a journalist and a matter of political tone as arithmetically interchangeable.

Separate, in its public communication, the hard tally from the perception survey, so readers know which part of the score rests on documented events and which rests on the opinions of an undisclosed few.

The point

The World Press Freedom Index is built on a worthy intent and a flawed modus operandi. Its purpose — to defend journalists and shame the powerful into restraint — is one any decent person should support. But the way it captures data and converts that data into a ranking has real, identifiable weaknesses: a questionnaire whose questions cannot cleanly separate coercion from choice; a qualitative score built by an anonymous, undisclosed, and very small group of respondents; an abuses tally that counts incidents without normalising for population or the sheer size of a country’s press; and a single definition of press freedom stretched across a world that does not share a single political model.

A country can deserve criticism for its treatment of the press — India does — and the tool used to deliver that criticism can still be too crude to trust as a precise ranking. Both things are true at once. The honest position is not to wave the Index away, and not to treat its rankings as a verdict, but to read it for what it actually is: a useful, well-meant signal, assembled by a method that has not yet earned the precision its two-decimal-point scores imply.

The intent is right. The method needs to grow up to match it.

NB: I am not an expert in this field. But somehow common sense tells me there is some problem with this press freedom index. Otherwise how countries like Qatar, Rwanda ranks higher than India. I also accept everything is not great in India but not so bad also. So did some research, used some AI and came up with this blog.