Pratik Sinha is a former Indian software engineer and journalist who co-founded the non-profit fact-checking website Alt News with Mohammad Zubair.
Contents
Wiki/Biography
Prateek Sinha was born on 28 April and hails from Ahmedabad, Gujarat. His zodiac sign is Taurus.
Childhood picture of Prateek Sinha with his parents
He did his schooling from Prakash Higher Secondary School, Ahmedabad. Prateek Sinha, resident of Ahmedabad, mother is Gujarati, while his father is Bengali. Hence, Pratik spent his childhood bouncing between cities, visiting Kolkata during his summer holidays. Raised by activist parents, Sinha developed social awareness at a very early age. Talking about his childhood in an interview, he said,
My childhood was such when dinner table conversations revolved around socio-political issues. So this thing was always in my mind.”
From 1999 to 2003, he pursued graduate engineering at the Bengaluru Institute of Technology, affiliated with Visvesvaraya Technological University in Bengaluru, Karnataka. , After completing his formal education, Sinha moved to the United States to pursue a career as a software engineer. Later he went to Vietnam. In March 2013, he returned to Ahmedabad. A turning point in his life came in 2016 when Jan Sangharsh Manch, a civil liberties organization formed by his parents, joined hands with Una Dalit Atrocities Fighting Committee for a march from Ahmedabad to Una. While documenting the march, Sinha recognized his inner desire to pursue a career in journalism. Talking about this in an interview, he said,
I documented the march on social media. It had a huge impact and I thought, maybe, I should do something related to media. Moreover, I was not at all happy with my engineering career. I felt that my work was only benefiting the economically privileged.
Later he started living in Kolkata, West Bengal.
Physical Appearance
Height (Approx): 5′ 9″
Hair Colour: Black (Half Bald)
Eye colour: black
Family
Pratik Sinha’s father, Mukul Sinha, was an Indian human rights activist and lawyer in the Gujarat High Court in Ahmedabad, who died of lung cancer on 12 May 2014. Prateek’s mother Nirjhari Sinha worked as a scientist for 35 years. Mukul and Nirjhari together founded Jan Sangharsh Manch, an independent civil rights organization to address labor and workers’ rights issues. The civil liberties organization led the movement against the injustice done to the victims of the 2002 riots and the families of encounter victims; Mukul Sinha represented those families legally. Nirjhari Sinha is also the director of Pravda Media Foundation, a non-profit company under which Alt News operates. Prateek has no siblings.
Pratik Sinha’s parents
Pratik Sinha with his mother
Religion
Prateek Sinha is an atheist.
Pratik Sinha’s Facebook post shows that he is an atheist
livelihood
After completing his formal education, he started working at De Biggins Engineering Innovations Pvt. Ltd. From 2003 to 2005, he worked as a Senior Software Engineer at Ubiktech Software Pvt. Ltd., Bengaluru. At Ubiktec, he worked in the area of product design and development for firewalls and VPNs for the company’s flagship products. From 2004 to 2009, he was a member of the technical staff at Arada Systems, Bengaluru. He held several positions at Arada Systems, including the positions of software developer, kernel engineer, and manager of the enterprise support group. Later, he joined Cloudleaf, Inc. as a senior software engineer. got included in. In 2009, he began working as a freelancer for Humbug, a software development company in Vietnam. In May 2012, he joined multinational software outsourcing organization InfoNam, Inc. as technical coordinator in Vietnam. Joined. From August 2013 to February 2014, he held the position of Senior Embedded Software Engineer at ReadMe Systems Inc., Ahmedabad. On 9 February 2017, Pratik Sinha along with Mohammad Zubair founded the Alt News website in Ahmedabad to tackle the phenomenon of fake news. For about a year, Zubair simply assisted Sinha in running the site and continued working for Nokia in the meantime. Zubair eventually left his job at Nokia in September 2018 and joined Alt News as a full-time employee. In 2022, Sinha announced that he would set up a branch in Kolkata, West Bengal.
Controversy
Objectionable tweet against Lord Ganesha
Following the arrest of Mohammad Zubair on 27 June 2022, a Twitter user named @baljikijaiiin, a Hanuman devotee, shared Prateek Sinha’s tweet posted in 2015 in which he had mocked Lord Ganesha and questioned whether elephant heads Some man existed. Hanuman devotee has tagged Delhi Police in his post and urged them to take action against Zubair.
Hanuman devotee’s reaction to Prateek Sinha’s 2015 tweet
Earlier, the Hanuman devotee had highlighted Zubair’s 2018 tweet which led to his arrest by Delhi Police on charges of hurting religious sentiments.
Facts/General Knowledge
- His Twitter username is free_thinker.
- After his arrest in June 2022, various media houses reported that transactions worth more than Rs 50 lakh had taken place in Zubair’s bank account in the past. Alt News co-founder Prateek Sinha refuted the allegations against Zubair through a tweet and said that the police are linking donations received by Alt News to Zubair.
FACT-CHECK: Absolutely false. Police are linking the donations received by Alt News to Zubair. All the money Alt News receives goes to the banks of organizations and not to any individual. The bank statement of Zubair’s personal account, a copy of which I have, refutes this lie. pic.twitter.com/esrmEVpTPp
– Pratik Sinha (@free_thinker) 28 June 2022
- Like his father, Pratik Sinha is also a vocal critic of former Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi. After Sinha returned to Ahmedabad from Vietnam in March 2013, his father was diagnosed with lung cancer in August 2013. He founded a Facebook page called ‘Truth of Gujarat’ along with his father in 2014. Political blog exposes the misgovernance of Gujarat government and its leaders. In the about section of the page it is written,
A campaign to stop the subversion of the rule of law, and provide justice to the victims.”
This page was set up after the CBI issued a charge sheet against several Gujarat policemen who were found guilty of shooting four people in a fake encounter under the instructions of Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah, as At least 3 people had made allegations. Police officers including GL Singhal.
- He was included in the Peace Research Institute Oslo’s nomination list for the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize along with his co-founder Mohammed Zubair.
- Apart from Hindi and English, Sinha can also speak Bengali, but cannot read and write.
- He is a non-vegetarian.
Prateek Sinha’s Facebook post shows that he is a non-vegetarian
- He earned the OSM Inspiration of the Year Award at the Outlook Social Media Awards (2018).
Pratik Sinha received the OSM Inspiration of the Year Award at the Outlook Social Media Awards (2018)
- In 2019, he co-authored the book India Misinformed: The True Story, which aims to identify the key drivers of fabricated news, expose propaganda mechanisms, and introduce readers to techniques to detect fake news.
India Misinformed: The True Story
Categories: Biography
Source: vcmp.edu.vn