Terms of Use

1. Who these terms bind, and when they change

These terms form a contract between you and the publisher. They apply whether you read a single free article or hold a paid subscription. Where you subscribe, the plan description shown at checkout, our Privacy Policy and our Disclaimer are incorporated into this contract by reference.

We may amend these terms. Where a change materially affects your rights — price, renewal mechanics, the licence you grant us, or dispute resolution — we will give at least thirty days’ notice by email to account holders and by notice on the site, and the change will not apply to a subscription term you have already paid for. Continued use after the notice period is acceptance. The date at the top of this page is the version date.

2. Accounts

You may read a limited number of articles without an account. To comment, receive newsletters, use the e-paper or hold a subscription, you need one. You must be eighteen or older to open an account, give accurate details, and keep your credentials to yourself — an account is personal to one reader and may not be shared, resold or used by more than one person concurrently other than under an institutional plan that expressly says so.

You are responsible for activity under your account until you tell us it has been compromised. Tell us promptly if it has, and we will secure it. We may require re-verification of your email address, and may suspend an account where verification fails or where sign-in patterns indicate credential sharing at scale.

3. Subscriptions, pricing, taxes and payment

Subscription plans, inclusions and current prices are set out on our Pricing page. Prices are in Indian rupees and are exclusive of Goods and Services Tax unless the checkout page states otherwise; GST is applied at the rate in force on the date of the invoice, and a tax invoice is issued to the email address on the account. If you are registered for GST and supply a valid GSTIN at checkout, it will appear on the invoice; we cannot reissue an invoice to add a GSTIN after a supply has been reported.

Payments are collected by a third-party payment gateway. We do not receive or store full card details. If a payment fails we may retry it in accordance with the mandate you gave, and we will email you before access is affected.

We may change subscription prices. A price change does not affect the term you have already paid for; it takes effect from the next renewal, and we will tell you at least thirty days before that renewal, in a message whose subject line says so plainly.

4. Auto-renewal and cancellation

Subscriptions renew automatically at the end of each term unless cancelled, at the price and cycle shown at the time of renewal. Before each renewal we send a reminder to your registered email address: at least five days before a monthly renewal and at least fifteen days before an annual renewal, stating the amount, the date and how to stop it.

You may cancel at any time from Account → Subscription → Cancel renewal, or by writing to us. Cancellation stops the next charge; it does not shorten the term you have already paid for, and your access continues until that term ends. Where a mandate exists with your bank or card issuer, cancelling with us cancels the mandate; you do not need to contact your bank separately.

Refunds. If you cancel within seven days of a first-time subscription and have opened no more than three paywalled articles in that period, we refund in full. Beyond that, annual plans cancelled mid-term are refunded pro rata for whole unused months, less any promotional discount that was conditional on the full term. Monthly plans are not refunded part-month. Where a renewal was charged despite a valid cancellation, or where the service was unavailable for more than seventy-two consecutive hours through our fault, we refund in full without argument. Refunds are made to the original payment instrument within seven working days of approval.

Nothing in this clause limits any right you have as a consumer under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019 and the rules made under it.

5. The paywall and article metering

Some articles are free to all readers. Some are metered: you may open a set number in a rolling period before we ask you to subscribe. Some are available only to subscribers. Which category an article falls into is an editorial and commercial decision that we may change, including after publication, though we do not retrospectively paywall a story that carries an active public-safety notice.

The meter is operated using browser storage and, if you are signed in, your account. Deliberately defeating the meter — by clearing storage in an automated loop, rotating identities, using multiple accounts to obtain free reads, or circumventing any access control — is a breach of these terms and of section 43 of the Information Technology Act, 2000. We may throttle, block or suspend where we detect it.

We publish the current meter allowance on the Pricing page and will give notice on that page before reducing it.

6. Comments and letters: code of conduct

Comment threads and the letters column exist so that readers can add knowledge, correct us and argue with each other in good faith. To keep them worth reading, these rules apply.

• Address the argument, not the person. No abuse, slurs, or attacks based on religion, caste, region, gender, disability or sexual orientation.
• No content that is defamatory, obscene, threatening, or that invades another person’s privacy, including doxxing.
• No incitement to violence or hatred, and nothing that threatens public order or the sovereignty and integrity of India.
• No misinformation presented as fact, no impersonation of another person or institution, and no undisclosed commercial or political interest in the subject.
• No coordinated posting, vote manipulation, spam or promotional links.
• Nothing that infringes copyright, and nothing subject to a court order restraining publication.

Moderation is human and pre-publication on sensitive stories, human and post-publication elsewhere. We may decline, edit for length and clarity, or remove a contribution. Removal is not a finding against you and we will tell you which rule was applied if you ask. Repeated breaches lead to a posting suspension, then to closure of commenting rights; the reading subscription is unaffected and is not forfeited. You may appeal a moderation decision to the Grievance Officer, whose details appear at the end of this page.

7. Your content, and the licence you give us

You keep ownership of comments, letters, photographs, documents and other material you submit. By submitting it for publication you grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide licence to publish, reproduce, edit for length and clarity, translate, archive, and distribute that material as part of NewsDunia and its syndication, in all media, for as long as we keep the relevant edition available. You also permit us to attribute it to the name on your account.

You warrant that the material is yours to give, that it does not infringe anyone’s rights, and that any personal data in it was obtained lawfully. You may ask us to remove your material; we will do so unless removal would misrepresent a published exchange, in which case we will anonymise instead and mark the edit.

Material sent to us as a confidential tip is not covered by this licence and is handled under section 8 of our Privacy Policy. We do not publish it without agreeing terms with you first.

8. Prohibited use of the service

You may not use NewsDunia to break the law, to interfere with the service or with other readers, or to extract value from it in a way these terms do not permit. Specifically, you may not: probe, scan or test the vulnerability of our systems; circumvent authentication or access controls; introduce malicious code; impose an unreasonable load on our infrastructure; harvest email addresses or account details; frame our pages so as to obscure their source; remove or obscure bylines, credits, watermarks or copyright notices; or use the service to distribute advertising we have not agreed to.

We reserve our rights under the Information Technology Act, 2000, including sections 43, 65 and 66, and under the Copyright Act, 1957, in respect of any such conduct.

9. Scraping, text and data mining, and AI training

Reporting costs money to produce. It is produced by named journalists whose time we pay for, and it is not raw material that others may take for free.

Except with our prior written permission, you may not: use any automated means — crawler, spider, scraper, headless browser, extension or script — to access, index, copy, store or reproduce NewsDunia content, other than as a general-purpose search engine or news aggregator obeying our robots directives; carry out text and data mining on our content, including bulk extraction of headlines, article text, images, illustrations, data tables or structured metadata; or use our content, in whole or in part, to develop, train, fine-tune, evaluate, benchmark or ground any machine-learning or generative artificial-intelligence model, including by retrieval at inference time for the purpose of producing a substitute for reading the original.

Our robots directives and machine-readable rights reservations are to be read as an express reservation of rights for these purposes, and access to the site does not imply a licence for them. We license our archive for research and for AI training on commercial terms; write to the address at the end of this page and we will discuss it seriously and quickly. Permission, where granted, is specific, in writing, and carries attribution and volume conditions.

These restrictions do not limit anything permitted as fair dealing under section 52 of the Copyright Act, 1957 — including quotation for the purpose of criticism, review or the reporting of current events, with attribution and a link.

10. Our intellectual property, and syndication

All content published on NewsDunia — text, headlines, illustrations, data visualisations, page design, the NewsDunia name and masthead, and the arrangement of the whole — is owned by or licensed to the publisher and is protected by the Copyright Act, 1957 and the Trade Marks Act, 1999.

You may read, print and share articles for your own personal, non-commercial use, and link to any page freely. You may quote briefly with attribution to NewsDunia and the reporter, and a link to the original. You may not republish articles in full, distribute them in a newsletter or intranet, or incorporate them into a commercial product without a syndication licence. Institutional and classroom licences are available; so is reprint permission for a single article. Requests go to the contact block below.

Where we publish third-party material under licence — a photograph, a chart, a wire report — that material is credited and its own licence governs it.

11. Availability, and limits on our liability

We work to keep NewsDunia available, accurate and secure, but we do not promise uninterrupted service. Maintenance, network failure, third-party outages and events beyond our reasonable control can and do interrupt access. Editorial content is provided subject to our Disclaimer, which you should read as part of these terms.

To the extent permitted by law: we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss, or for loss of profit, revenue, business, goodwill or anticipated savings, arising from your use of or inability to use the service; and our total aggregate liability to you in connection with the service in any twelve-month period is limited to the amount you paid us for the service in that period, or two thousand rupees, whichever is greater.

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded — including your statutory rights as a consumer.

12. Suspension and termination

You may close your account at any time from Account → Settings, or by writing to us; closure and its effect on data are described in our Privacy Policy. We may suspend or terminate access where you materially breach these terms, where required by law or a competent authority, or where continued access presents a security risk. Except where the breach is serious or the law prevents it, we will tell you first, explain which term is engaged, and give you a reasonable opportunity to put it right.

If we terminate a paid subscription other than for your breach, we refund the unused portion. Sections 7, 9, 10, 11, 13 and 14 survive termination.

13. Grievances, disputes and arbitration

Talk to us first: most disputes end with a conversation. Complaints about content, moderation or service go to the Grievance Officer using the details below, and are acknowledged within twenty-four working hours and resolved within fifteen days, in line with the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021. If our response does not satisfy you, the Rules provide for escalation to the self-regulatory body of which we are a member, and thereafter to the oversight mechanism of the Central Government.

If a dispute remains unresolved thirty days after the Grievance Officer’s final response, it shall be referred to arbitration by a sole arbitrator under the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996. The seat and venue of arbitration shall be New Delhi and the language shall be English. The arbitrator shall be appointed by agreement, failing which in accordance with the Act. The award is final and binding.

Arbitration does not prevent either party from seeking urgent interim relief from a court, nor does it displace any forum available to you as a consumer under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019.

14. Governing law, and general terms

These terms are governed by the laws of India. Subject to section 13, the courts at New Delhi have exclusive jurisdiction.

If any provision is held unenforceable, it is severed and the rest continues in force. A failure to enforce a term is not a waiver of it. You may not assign your rights under these terms; we may assign ours to a successor to the publishing business on notice to you. These terms, together with the documents they incorporate, are the entire agreement between us about the service. The English version prevails over any translation.