Nashik Floods - TOI gives cold shoulder to Rest of Maharashtra

In mid-September, Maharashtra was lashed with very heavy rains. Nature’s fury peaked on the 18th and many rivers in Maharashtra were flowing above the danger mark with Godavari wrecking the maximum havoc. This caused the worst floods in Nashik in the last forty years, rendering 6000 families homeless. Also huge amount of food grains were destroyed in the Nashik market causing problems for the local population.

Ideally, Times of India (Mumbai Edition) should have mentioned this as the main news on 19th… or at least the 20th. But no news on this right up to 23rd September! Finally TOI gave a small article on page 5 on this tragedy on the 24th. Does this mean that TOI does not cover flood related news… of course not! They do cover floods in Bihar and Orissa… even in distant lands! But they fail to cover news of floods that occur 180 Kms from their Head Office. Surprisingly Hindu (which does not have a Mumbai edition) has been regularly giving news about the floods in Maharashtra.

So I would request you to pick up the TOI copies of the last 10-15 days and just skim through them for articles about ROM (Rest of Maharashtra)? Hardly any… Only significant one was about Reliance SEZ that is soon going to be a part of Mumbai anyway and the Malegaon blasts because terrorism is a hot topic. One can’t considered stamp size news about “aid to Marathwada” and “Maratha reservations” as coverage of ROM. Are Hindustan Times and DNA any different? The answer is an dismal NO! I have raised the issue of sidelining of Marathi Cultural events by English media in Mumbai earlier.

3M feels - English Media in Mumbai thinks that the Marathi People are culturally 2nd grade citizens of this city and hence topics of their interest need not be covered. I would love to see this hypothesis proved wrong!