Journalist booked for recording video of salt-roti midday meal

Lucknow: A case has been registered against a journalist and a village-head representative for allegedly doing "despicable work" of maligning the Uttar Pradesh government by recording a video of schoolchildren being served salt and roti as their midday meal.

The FIR stated that the village head's representative, Rajkumar Pal, was aware that only rotis were cooked and vegetable was not cooked in the Siyur Primary School in Jamalpur block of Mirzapur district.

But "instead of arranging it", Pal called journalist Pawan Kumar Jaiswal, who works in the print media, and "pressed him to run it" in the electronic media, according to the complaint lodged on Saturday by Mirzapur block education officer Prem Shankar Ram at the Ahraura police station.

Jaiswal and Pal have been booked under sections 120B (criminal conspiracy), 186 (obstructing public servant in discharging duty), 193 (false evidence) and 420 (cheating) of the Indian Penal Code, a senior police officer said. Some unnamed persons are also mentioned in the first information report.

Jaiswal, however, denied the allegations. "This is against journalism. You can see the news and verify it," he told a television channel.