Role of the Mass Media in Monitoring and Influencing the Performance of Social Welfare Schemes in India Ashima Mital anz208486@cse.iitd.ac.in IIT Delhi New Delhi, India Sahil Dahake cs5170488@cse.iitd.ac.in IIT Delhi New Delhi, India Tanmay Patel cs5170420@cse.iitd.ac.in IIT Delhi New Delhi, India Utsav Deep cs1180396@cse.iitd.ac.in IIT Delhi New Delhi, India Diwakar Prajapati cs1180330@cse.iitd.ac.in IIT Delhi New Delhi, India Akshay Gupta akshay.40gupta@gmail.com IIT Delhi New Delhi, India Vivek Singh thevivekcode@gmail.com IIT Delhi New Delhi, India Aadish Jain mcs202443@cse.iitd.ac.in IIT Delhi New Delhi, India Aaditeshwar Seth aseth@cse.iitd.ac.in IIT Delhi New Delhi, India ABSTRACT Abstract : The mass media plays an important role in democratic so- cieties to impose checks and balances on the functioning of various institutions of the state, and in shaping public opinion by informing people about the performance of these institutions. The agenda of the mass media can however be influenced by the government in power, especially if the media is dependent on the government for funding, or the government is powerful and can compromise the safety of media personnel. In this paper, we carefully examine the interactions between three factors: the performance in India of a social welfare scheme on rural employment guarantee (obtained from oficial records), the volume and sentiment of coverage of these factors in the mass media (obtained through an analysis of news articles of six English national newspapers), and the political alignment between the state governments in diferent states with the central government (obtained from election data). We construct a time series of these three datasets from 2014 to 2021, and show (a) how various performance factors of the welfare scheme are treated diferently by the media in diferent states based on whether they are aligned or non-aligned with the Central government, and (b) whether coverage in the media is able to influence the performance of the welfare scheme. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study of its kind to examine the interplay between media bias, government performance, and government influence, and helps uncover the complexities and nuances of these relationships. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permited. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. COMPASS ’22, June 29-July 1, 2022, Seatle, WA, USA © 2022 Association for Computing Machinery. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-9347-8/22/06. . . $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3530190.3534826 CCS CONCEPTS • Applied computing → Document management and text processing; Law, social and behavioral sciences. KEYWORDS MGNREGA, Employment Guarantee scheme, Social Welfare scheme, Mass media, time-series, Center-State political alignment ACM Reference Format: Ashima Mital, Sahil Dahake, Tanmay Patel, Utsav Deep, Diwakar Prajapati, Akshay Gupta, Vivek Singh, Aadish Jain, and Aaditeshwar Seth. 2022. Role of the Mass Media in Monitoring and Influencing the Performance of Social Welfare Schemes in India. In ACM SIGCAS/SIGCHI Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies (COMPASS) (COMPASS ’22), June 29- July 1, 2022, Seatle, WA, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 25 pages. https: //doi.org/10.1145/3530190.3534826 1 INTRODUCTION Government supported welfare schemes play a crucial role in ful- filling basic needs and providing essential services for the poor to realize their capabilities and lead dignified lives [15]. The imple- mentation of these schemes may encounter several issues though, such as to do with unfair exclusion arising from low budgets or inaccurate targeting, corrupt or ineficient administrative prac- tices especially at the last mile, or underlying design issues with the programme itself, especially when programmes are designed to benefit specific social groups and can lead to clientelism [24]. Media can play a crucial role to improve the implementation of wel- fare schemes by prominently highlighting their gaps, and thereby impose checks and balances for democratically functioning soci- eties to ensure that adequate atention is paid to welfare schemes towards building a more equal society [9]. However, media can also be selective in highlighting various issues, especially in coun- tries such as India where mass media organizations rely heavily on revenue from government advertisements for their financial sustainability and hence form political afiliations that leads to media bias [36], ofen by avoiding or delaying the reporting of events critical of the government [16]. In this paper, we atempt 78