Methodology
How the India Narrative Index is built
The Index answers one question: how did the world's media frame a particular India-related event? It does not decide whether a country is a friend or an enemy of India, and it does not measure public opinion.
The INI score
Every article receives an India Narrative Index score from −100 (strongly critical of India, an Indian institution, or India's actions in relation to that event) to +100 (strongly favorable). Zero is mixed or neutral framing.
| INI score | Classification |
|---|---|
| −100 to −60 | Strongly Critical |
| −59 to −20 | Critical |
| −19 to +19 | Neutral / Mixed |
| +20 to +59 | Favorable |
| +60 to +100 | Strongly Favorable |
The score is not general emotional sentiment. An article covering a terrorist attack may use grim language and still be neutral toward India. Quoted criticism is separated from framing the publication itself adopts.
Event normalization
Raw scores are not enough. Every publication is measured against how global media covered the same event.
Example: a genuinely negative event
Kashmir Attack 2026 might have a Global INI around −42. If BBC scores −48, CNN −45 and Reuters −40, a naïve sentiment system would brand all three “negative toward India.” Relative to the global baseline they are roughly in line: −6, −3 and +2.
Narrative Divergence is publication (or country) INI minus the global event INI. Narrative Tilt is the average of those divergences across many events — the Media Index metric.
How scores roll up
- Articles are scored individually.
- A publication's event score is the average of its articles — not a volume-weighted country dump.
- A country's event score is the average of its publication scores. One outlet that writes 100 pieces cannot stand in for the country.
- The global event score is the average of country scores that meet the data threshold.
Minimum data thresholds
- Publication score: at least 3 relevant articles.
- Country score: at least 3 publications and 10 articles. Otherwise the map shows Insufficient Data.
Country colors represent media coverage originating from that country — not the opinion of its government or population.
What this prototype contains
V1 of this interface is filled with internally consistent, real-looking dummy data: curated publications, seeded article scores, and the same aggregation rules a live pipeline will use. The live system will ingest articles from a global news provider, assign them to analyst-approved events, and score them with the INI classifier described above.
India Narrative Index · illustrative data for product prototype