About

The South Asian Story is a non-commercial, public-interest platform monitoring human rights across South and Southeast Asia.

We aggregate verified news headlines from trusted sources across Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar — and pair each with an independently written summary and a direct link to the original reporting. We reproduce nothing. We send all traffic back to the source.

We also publish original op-ed commentary from journalists, lawyers, researchers, and civil society voices working in the region.

Our goal is accountability, not traffic. We serve no government, accept no advertising, and answer to no commercial interest. We exist because these stories matter and because they are too often buried, dismissed, or suppressed.

The South Asian Story is an aggregator and a platform for contributed commentary. We are not a newsgathering organisation. We do not conduct original reporting. Every news item on this platform links directly to the reporting organisation that did the work.

Verification of sources

We only surface headlines from a fixed, editorially vetted list of publications and organisations. No source is added to this list without deliberate editorial review. The full source list is published on this page. Readers can always see exactly where we draw from.

Allegations and attribution

Human rights reporting frequently involves unresolved allegations against named individuals — officials, commanders, institutions. The South Asian Story never states an allegation as an established fact. Our AI-generated summaries are required to attribute all allegations to the reporting organisation using language such as “according to [source]” or “as documented by [source].”

No advocacy

We do not campaign for any government, political party, or policy position. We surface and summarise what verified sources report. The editorial judgement we exercise is in source selection and summary review — not in taking sides.

Corrections

If we get something wrong, we correct it. Correction notices are displayed visibly on the relevant news card. A corrections contact is available at all times. See the Contact section of this page.

The South Asian Story uses an AI model to find recent headlines from our verified source list and to generate short, original summaries of each story.

What the AI does

When you load the news feed, our system searches for recent human rights stories from our verified source list and returns a set of headlines. For each story, the AI writes an original two-sentence summary in its own words.

What the AI is strictly prohibited from doing

The AI may not access or read the body text of any article. It may not reproduce or closely paraphrase any text from a source publication. It may not state an allegation as fact. It may not fabricate a URL, date, or source name.

How we verify AI output

Every AI-generated summary is checked automatically against the source article’s publicly available search snippet before it is displayed. Summaries that are too similar to the original text are either regenerated or held for editorial review.

Our AI logs

Every AI summary generation call is logged — including the full prompt sent and the full output received — and retained for a minimum of 24 months. These logs exist so that we can be held accountable for what our system produces.

Why we use AI

South and Southeast Asia spans five countries, dozens of languages, and hundreds of active human rights situations. AI allows a small editorial team to surface stories across this entire region consistently, without reproducing a word of anyone’s work.

The South Asian Story does not reproduce the content of any third-party article.

Each news item on this platform displays only: the verbatim headline, an independently generated 2-sentence summary written by AI in its own words, the source publication name, country and topic tags, the publication date, and a direct outbound link to the original article.

No article body text, images, thumbnails, or excerpts are stored, displayed, or processed by this platform.

AI summaries are generated from publicly available search metadata and the model’s general knowledge — never from scraped article content.

Op-ed pieces published on this platform are original works contributed directly by their authors, who retain full copyright. The South Asian Story holds only a non-exclusive licence to publish each piece. We publish with explicit written permission only.

If you are a publisher and have a concern about how your content is referenced on this platform, please contact us at thesouthasianstory@gmail.com. We will acknowledge within 48 hours and respond within 7 working days.