About this project

A citation-backed record of people in India — RTI activists, journalists, investigative reporters, government officers, politicians and whistleblowers — who died, by confirmed or suspected murder or in disputed circumstances, while doing work in the public interest.

It is modelled on memorial-style trackers that pair a map and a list. The goal is not to accuse, but to remember, and to make the public record — who they were, what they were exposing, and what happened to the case afterwards — easy to find and verify.

What is included

The dataset centres on the last ten years (2016–2026) and also includes landmark earlier cases going back to the 1990s — the whistleblowers, rationalists, officers and journalists whose deaths shaped this story (Satyendra Dubey, Shanmugam Manjunath, Narendra Dabholkar and others). Each person is included only where their death is documented by reputable reporting or rights organisations, and where there is a credible link between their public-interest work and the manner of their death.

How to read the labels

Every record carries explicit confidence labels so nothing reads as more certain than it is.

Cause of death

• Confirmed murder / suicide — established by investigation or court.
• Suspected murder — strong indications, not conclusively established.
• Speculative suicide — recorded as suicide but seriously contested.
• Suspicious accident / Unconfirmed — manner of death disputed or unknown.

Perpetrator

• Confirmed — established by a court verdict.
• Speculative — named or alleged, but not proven in court.
• Unconfirmed — suspects exist but identity is unclear.
• Unknown — no perpetrator identified.

Court case

• Open / ongoing — investigation or trial in progress.
• Closed — conviction / acquittal / no charges — final outcome.
• No case filed / Unknown.

Sources & method

Records are built primarily from: theCommittee to Protect Journalistsdatabase; the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative’s tracking ofattacks on RTI users; Wikipedia; and contemporaneous news reporting. Every entry links to at least one source, and most carry several. Locations are geocoded to the place of death; some are approximate to the town or district.

Disclaimer

Where a court has not delivered a verdict, any named or described suspect is anallegation only, reported as attributed to the cited source, and everyone is presumed innocent until proven guilty. Nothing here is a finding of fact against any individual. Dates, places and case outcomes are summarised from public reporting and may contain errors or become out of date.

Corrections

This is a living record. If a detail is wrong, a case status has changed, or a person who belongs here is missing, corrections backed by a source are welcome and will be incorporated.