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Urgent: Protecting our kids from predators demands immediate awareness

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Mumbai: In the digital age, the rapid expansion of technology has brought about both unprecedented opportunities and disturbing challenges. One such disconcerting challenge is the emergence of child predators, individuals who exploit the innocence and vulnerability of children for their own sinister motives. Child predators exploit various platforms, from social media networks to online gaming communities, to manipulate and groom young victims into engaging in harmful activities.

As a society, it is imperative that we confront this grave issue head-on, understanding the methods predators employ and taking collective action to protect our most vulnerable members – our children. In this discussion, we will delve into the unsettling world of child predators, examining their tactics, the impacts on victims and families, and the measures that can be taken to prevent and combat their activities.

Qissé Films in partnership with MISSING, an NGO working on child trafficking prevention, has released a PSA (Public Service Announcement) that aims to create awareness and drive conversations around child online safety.

Conceptualized by Qissé Films and MISSING, the film features the narrative of two young children from different backgrounds and how they get exploited by strangers who pose as friends on social media. It showcases how easily they fall prey to online traffickers even from the perceived safety of their homes. The film ends with a cautionary message of introspecting who you are really talking to online. It shockingly reveals that these predators target children as young as nine years and shares a WhatsApp number that can be reached out for anyone seeking help.

The PSA is supported by NCPCR (National Commission for Protection of Child Rights) and Cyber Peace. It is playing across PVR theatres in the country.

Indira Aditi Rawat, the director of the film, says, “Having worked with non-profits focused on children for many years, I was clear that the film should avoid sensationalism or melodrama and maintain authenticity. The narrative journey should be simple and show how ordinary conversations can lead to distressing situations for children who are isolated from their parents when spending time on their devices.”

Luv Kalla and Richa Maheshwari, Founders of Qisse Films, say, “We’ve all had worried conversations about our children spending more and more unsupervised time online. To make the online space safer for our kids, we need to get these conversations out of the living rooms and to the public forums. We at Qissé are glad to be able to create a film and aid MISSING, who are doggedly working to raise awareness, educate and push for policy initiatives to create a safe online environment for our children.”

Leena Kejriwal, Founder Missing Link Trust and strident advocate for anti-child trafficking and child safety, says “Our children in India face the highest risk of online abuse in the world, with a child being either abused or going missing every 10 minutes. Films play a powerful role in building public awareness, which is the first step in prevention. Qissé’s impactful film will help us prevent online abuse by building awareness about the alarming statistics and beginning a dialogue about the issue with parents, children, schools and the community at large. There is an urgent need for the public to get involved and help build a safer online world for our children.”

The helpline WhatsApp chat number is 60030 60040, and it aims to provide 24/7 information and assistance to parents and children grappling with this issue.

Indiantelevision.com in conversation with Leena Kejriwal, Founder – Missing Link Trust on the research done by them, the messaging and much more…..

On why this messaging is important now

India unfortunately leads the world in child abuse statistics. Every 10 minutes an Indian child either goes missing or is abused. From 2017-2020, 24 lakh CSAM cases were reported from India. This number increased to 56 lakhs in 2022, registering a six per cent increase from 2021.

The restrictions of movement and social distancing measures during COVID-19 pushed the whole world and their children online. The children came online way faster than we expected and there was no basic education or systems of digital hygiene and cyber civic sense in place.  A study conducted by McAfee reported that children in India are among the youngest to reach mobile maturity and report the highest exposure to online risks. Children in India aged 10 to 14 appear to adopt mobile more quickly than nearly all their peers worldwide.

Sex abuse and exploitation have now been recognized as a social issue and then a criminal justice issue. The pandemic caused a further escalation by shifting the abuse from offline to online spaces and left our children vulnerable in their very homes. The need for awareness about the issue amongst the children, parents and society at large is becoming critical, to keep our children safe. MISSING is continuously working to raise awareness to address this alarming social issue of child sexual abuse & exploitation. We have taken up the mission of online child safety, through the public service announcement (PSA). The PSA aims to raise awareness about the perils of child trafficking and educate the public on its prevention. These PSA films will enable us to create a dialogue and to reach our target audience directly.

The CTA of this film is our Online Child Safety Desk which is a WhatsApp chatbot available at 6003060040, which is created by us for children and parents.

On Missing garnering info on missing children

Our founder Leena Kejriwal was drawn to the issue as early as 2000 and for over a decade she worked with friends and NGOs in the red-light district like Urmi Basu of New Light in Kalighat, Srabani Roy of South Kolkata Humari Muskaan in Bowbazar and others. It was years of engagement that made her realize the importance of public engagement. The public which is the most important stakeholder in the issue, was far away from most of the anti-trafficking conversations. Since then, she has been working with experts- educationists, cyber security experts and child rights experts who understand the depth of the issue and its nuances.

Since we started the Missing Awareness and Safety School program (MASSp) in 2018, we have had direct conversations with students, parents, teachers and caregivers and realized that we have garnered many insights from our interactions and research with them. Our M&E gives us deep insights into the choices children make and what drives them to risqué behaviour.

On the PVR collaboration

Missing started as a public art campaign and public advocacy has been a crucial agenda for all our work. We created our first PSA in 2016. We have an award-winning game and comics, and we are constantly looking at reaching our target audiences through our multiple assets. PVR collaboration is the next most natural direction for engaging the public because anybody from a 10-year-old to an 80-year-old is PVR INOX’s target audience, including children, young adults, parents, caregivers, guardians and every member of society. Hence a PVR cinema space is a powerful space for raising mass awareness. PVR INOX Cinemas with its 17000 halls and access to 20 million viewers will help in taking the PSA to its target beneficiaries – the public.

On the film being screened on all PVR screens and the message reaching to larger audience

Stop Online Stalkers (#SOS) needs all the help it can get to be prompted on every screen and in conversation. There is no issue more urgent as our children’s online safety needs to be prioritized. This cannot be done by just one section of the community. It has to be a collective effort of multiple stakeholders who have access to the public screen. Parents, schools, cyber safety officials, policymakers, the government and most important of all, the public. You and me. We need to join hands on child safety and the #SOS campaign.

On Missing talking to schools and parents to educate them on how to ensure the safety of their children in cyberspace

Our motto is why wait for a child to be trafficked to save them. We work on prevention. The first step to prevention is education and awareness. We have been conducting our Missing Awareness and Safety School program (MASSp) since 2017. We conduct it for adolescents from the age group of 13-18 and the entire program is one of its kind, audio visual, geography agnostic and all our assets are embedded within it. We talk about cybersafety within our program.

Within our #SOS campaign too, we have the #SOS Forum which is ongoing right now in cities across the country, where students are engaging in dialogues with us, other issue experts, policy makers, cyber safety officials and government agencies. Concerned parents are invited to join #SOSMums and raise their awareness as well as their voices on this issue on social media.

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IDS 2026: AI rewires media value chain, says JioStar’s Prashant Khanna

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BENGALURU: Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming the operating backbone of the media industry, transforming everything from content creation to distribution, said JioStar head – sports and live experiences, production technology and services Prashant Khanna, at the India Digital Summit 2026.

Speaking at a panel on automating the content value chain organised by IAMAI, Khanna said AI was no longer a peripheral tool but a core layer enabling scale, precision and personalisation across media workflows.

Live sports, he noted, requires unparalleled accuracy, with tens of millions of viewers watching in real time. AI-driven systems are now helping production teams move from reactive execution to predictive storytelling, using data, context and historical patterns to anticipate visuals, graphics and narrative elements before they are needed.

This shift, Khanna said, allows creative professionals to focus more on storytelling while automation handles manual processes.

Beyond production, AI is reshaping distribution by enabling the same live content to be delivered across multiple formats, from vertical video and short highlights to extended recaps and full-length broadcasts, tailored to different viewing preferences.

According to Khanna, seamless automation across the value chain is increasingly central to acquiring viewers and deepening engagement. He added that AI is also democratising premium production experiences, making features such as high-quality language commentary, advanced camera work, auto-framing and real-time adaptation accessible at scale.

Addressing the rise of AI-generated content, Khanna said technology lowers barriers to entry but does not replace the need for strong storytelling. Its true power lies in expanding creative possibilities rather than substituting narrative craft.

Looking ahead, he predicted a more immersive and interactive future for live entertainment, driven by virtual reality, second-screen experiences and personalised data layers, allowing fans to curate their own viewing experiences.

In Khanna’s view, AI’s true impact on media will be measured not by novelty, but by how seamlessly it integrates creativity, certainty and scale, turning the entire content lifecycle into a more intelligent, responsive and inclusive system.
 

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Why AI’s Next Big Flex is Knowing When to Zip It

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MUMBAI: We’ve all been sold the same sci-fi fever dream for decades: the invisible digital butler. The Jarvis to our Tony Stark, if you may. An intelligence that doesn’t wait for a prompt but simply exists in the periphery, whispering the right answer before you’ve even finished forming the question.

Recent moves from the tech giants suggest we’re finally crossing the threshold into “personal intelligence,” a system that pulls context across your entire digital life. We have, thankfully, graduated from the “goldfish amnesia” phase of early LLMs. Context windows and memory features have given AI a decent short-term recall, but we are still languishing in the uncanny valley of partial context. You’ve likely had that moment where you stare at a generated response and wonder, “What on earth made you think that was what I wanted?” Custom instructions and pinned memories can only do so much heavy lifting when the AI is still looking at your life through a keyhole.

But as AI moves from a tool we “talk to” to a system that essentially lives in our OS, the industry is obsessed with the wrong metric. We’re still counting parameters and bragging about reasoning capabilities. The real breakthrough isn’t going to be how much the AI knows; it’s going to be how much it chooses to ignore.

From “Helpful” to “Opinionated”

When AI starts linking context across your life, it ceases to be a neutral tool and starts becoming an opinionated system. This is where the “intelligence” narrative gets spicy. At their core, Large Language Models still function as high-speed autocomplete. They predict the next word in a sequence based on a generic world-view, and that isn’t fundamentally changing. What is changing is the rise of agentic AI. Agents sit around the model, interacting with tools, data, and the environment to observe context, react to signals, and take action. Personal intelligence, then, becomes about how those predictions get applied to your specific history.

If these agents know your budget, your health goals, and your calendar, and you ask for a dinner recommendation, does it give you what you want or what it thinks you need? Imagine a scenario where you’ve had a brutal day at work, and you just want a greasy burger. However, your AI “sees” your high cortisol levels and the fact that you’ve missed your last three gym sessions. Does it “helpfully” bury the burger joint in the search results and prioritize a salad bar instead?

At what point does “helpful context” become a digital nanny? This isn’t just a UI challenge; it’s a fundamental shift in the power dynamic between human and machine. As these systems grow more proactive, governance can’t just be about data privacy, it has to be about agency. We need to ensure that as AI gets better at recognizing our needs, it doesn’t start dictating them to us. A system that “knows best” is only one bad update away from becoming a system that “knows better than you.” If an AI becomes too opinionated, it doesn’t solve friction; it creates a new kind of psychological tax where the user feels they have to “fight” their assistant to get what they actually want.

Designing the Invisible (and Avoiding the Creepy)

There is a razor-thin line between an AI that feels like a superpower and one that feels like a digital stalker. The tech industry has a pathological need to show its work. Usually, when a system gains a new capability, the marketing instinct is to broadcast it. But in the world of personal intelligence, this “Are you proud of me?” approach to software engineering is a fast track to the uncanny valley.

The goal for personal intelligence should be to become digital wallpaper essential, but unnoticed. The moment an AI “interrupts” to show off how much it knows about you, it has failed. To make AI feel invisible rather than invasive, we have to master the art of the “nudge.” This requires a deep understanding of human psychology, and by extension the art of shutting up.

The Ultimate Advantage: Strategic Restraint

The “hero narrative” of AI has always been about more: more data, more speed, more answers. But as we move into the era of personal intelligence, the ultimate competitive advantage is going to be restraint. This is a concept we rarely talk about in Silicon Valley, where “growth” and “engagement” are the primary gods. However, for a system to be truly personal, it must respect the sanctity of the user’s focus.

In the real world, the smartest person in the room is rarely the loudest; it’s the one who knows exactly when to chime in and when to stay silent. The same applies to our silicon counterparts. The engineering challenge is no longer just about building a model that can pass the Bar Exam or write a sonnet in the voice of a 17th-century pirate. The real challenge is building a model that has access to your deepest digital secrets and has the “wisdom” to do absolutely nothing with them until the exact moment it actually matters.

This brings us to the core question: Is the next AI advantage about intelligence, or about knowing when not to act on personal data?

If a company can prove that their AI has the discipline to stay in the background, they will win the one thing that is currently in shortest supply: trust. We are reaching “intelligence saturation.” Every major player has a model that is “smart.” What they don’t all have is a philosophy of silence. Knowing when not to act is the highest form of intelligence because it requires a level of contextual nuance that goes beyond pattern matching. It requires an understanding of human boundaries.

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Stockholding rolls out StockFin 2.0 app to simplify investing nationwide

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MUMBAI: When investing meets a software refresh, ease is the real upgrade. Stockholding Services Limited has rolled out Stockfin 2.0 nationwide, positioning the revamped investing app as a one-stop, mobile-first platform aimed at widening retail participation across India.

Designed to work as smoothly in metro markets as in fast-growing tier II and tier III cities, Stockfin 2.0 reflects the changing profile of India’s investors. Built on a future-ready architecture, the app features upgraded performance, a refreshed interface and a simplified structure intended to make market participation less intimidating and more intuitive.

The platform brings together equities, derivatives, stock SIPs, mutual funds, ETFs, SME stocks and IPOs within a single interface. Product-wise grouping allows users to navigate quickly, while a clean dashboard offers real-time snapshots of market indices, portfolio value, top gainers and losers, and profit and loss positions.

For investors seeking deeper insight, Stockfin 2.0 includes screeners, technical indicators, research calls and detailed reports. Short-term traders are catered to with a dedicated ‘Buy Today, Sell Tomorrow’ section, while goal-based mutual fund flows aim to simplify long-term financial planning.

The app also focuses on execution and security. Best price routing directs trades to the exchange offering the most competitive price, while MPIN, biometric login and OTP-based verification reinforce account safety. Personalisation options, including themes, font sizes and saved order settings, add flexibility to the user experience.

Speaking at the launch, officials highlighted the role of technology-led platforms in expanding financial inclusion and supporting India’s broader digital and self-reliance goals. Company leadership described Stockfin 2.0 as more than a cosmetic upgrade, positioning it as a step towards making investing more accessible, informed and dependable for retail participants nationwide.

Backed by StockHolding’s long-standing presence in financial services, the new app is aimed at investors who want real-time insights, secure access and the ability to manage multiple asset classes on the move, all without losing clarity in a fast-moving market.

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