Civic action, written for the people who'll actually use it.
HowToHelp is a youth-first civic-action publication. We answer the questions Indian readers aged 14–22 actually have — about FIRs the police won't register, RTIs that get refused, MGNREGA wages that didn't show up, POSH committees that don't exist, mental health helplines that aren't answered, pollution complaints that get buried.
What we cover
- Civic Action — RTI, MGNREGA, FIR, RERA, consumer rights, electoral integrity
- Health & Rights — Mental Healthcare Act, Ayushman Bharat, MTP Act, addiction support, Childline
- Environment — pollution complaints (SAMEER, CPCB), plastic-ban enforcement, EIA, NGT routes
- Personal Safety — POSH 2013, POCSO 2012, cybercrime portal, ragging helpline, domestic violence
How we write
Every article cites primary Indian sources — Supreme Court judgments, all 25 High Courts, central ministries, statutory commissions (NCW, NCPCR, NHRC, CIC), NCRB Crime in India reports, NFHS, India Justice Report, PRS Legislative Research. We avoid news aggregators and Wikipedia.
Every claim is run through a separate fact-verification pass against current web sources before publishing. When data has a known lag (NCRB ~12 months, NFHS-5 covers 2019–21, Census still 2011), we state the year explicitly instead of pretending it's current.
Articles include copy-paste templates: RTI applications, FIR drafts, IC complaint formats, helpline scripts. The escalation ladder for each topic is spelled out — what to do when the first step fails.
Editorial process
- Topics surface from a curated playbook of ~200 evergreen civic-action questions, plus headlines from Supreme Court, all 25 High Courts, and 60+ government portals.
- Each article is graded 0–100 against a strict rubric (statute accuracy, escalation completeness, primary-source citations, India specificity).
- A separate grounded fact-verifier cross-checks every claim against current authoritative sources before publishing.
- Articles auto-publish only if both the quality grade ≥ 80 AND the fact-check passes. Anything else routes to manual review.
- State-specific articles can also be published in the relevant regional language.
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Contact & corrections
See an out-of-date statute citation, a stale fee amount, a broken escalation step? We want to know — corrections are a feature, not a failure. Email us at [email protected]. It's also the address to use for any privacy request, including a parent or guardian asking to see or delete a student's data.