What is Panchranga?
Panchranga is an open-source, independent news intelligence platform for India. We aggregate, analyze, and present reporting from national mainstream media, independent grassroots publications, and public discourse side by side on one screen.
The name Panchranga means “five colors” (many colors) — reflecting our conviction that every story in a democracy has more than one angle. You deserve to see the complete spectrum.
The Three-Lane Structure
Every story is segmented into three independent editorial perspectives to highlight cross-media framing.
Mainstream Media
Leading national daily newspapers, established broadcasters, and official government press channels (e.g. The Hindu, Indian Express, NDTV, Times of India, PIB).
Focus: Institutional record, press statements, and national headline reach.
Grassroots & Regional
Independent newsrooms, ground-report collectives, investigative outlets, and regional media (e.g. Jist, Peek TV, The Wire, Scroll.in, LiveLaw, Mongabay India, PARI).
Focus: Ground-level impacts, labor, marginalized communities, and regional investigation.
Public Discourse
Real-time civic reactions, online community threads, and independent policy explainers (e.g. Reddit communities, Youth Ki Awaaz, Unfiltered by Samdish, Soch).
Focus: Grassroots civic sentiment, citizen reactions, and unfiltered community dialogue.
How Topic Clustering Works
Rather than relying on human editors or rigid keyword tags, Panchranga uses automated semantic machine learning to group related articles into coherent Topic Hubs.
When articles and video reports are fetched from our 185+ active sources across 13 Indian languages, each headline and excerpt is passed through our multilingual 384-dimensional vector embedding engine.
Our pipeline calculates the cosine similarity between new articles and active clusters within a rolling time window. If an article shares strong mathematical similarity with an ongoing event, it is automatically attached to that topic hub — regardless of whether different publications use completely different phrasing or report in English or regional languages.
If a cluster contains sufficient reporting across lanes, our pipeline generates an objective neutral overview summarizing key verified statements, with strict guardrails bypassing AI generation on sensitive legal or communal topics.
⚠️ Editorial Principles & Fact Checking
Panchranga is an aggregator and intelligence platform — we do not adjudicate truth or invent editorial lines. We display reports directly from original publishers and encourage readers to verify claims against accredited independent fact-checking organizations:
100% Free & Open Source
Panchranga is developed as an open-source public good for Indian media literacy. The entire codebase is available on GitHub.
Contact & Corrections
Panchranga is an independent open-source media intelligence initiative. We welcome corrections, feedback, suggestions for new RSS feeds, and technical contributions.
Editorial & Corrections
Notice an issue with source categorization or lane placement?
panchranga.news@gmail.com →Code & Contributions
Report bugs, request features, or propose new feeds on GitHub.
Open an Issue on GitHub →