How the register is made
Chikitsa is a register of signals, not a news service and not a surveillance system. A signal is a reported event that a human reviewer has read, classified, located and summarised from a named source. Nothing appears here automatically.
What counts as a signal
- It concerns health in India — an outbreak, a supply failure, a facility problem, a safety notice.
- It comes from a source we can name and link, with a captured copy and a checksum.
- A reviewer can say what happened in about sixty plain words without naming a patient.
- Rumour and unverified claims are recorded as such in the summary, never dressed up as confirmation.
Severity
- Critical — immediate, wide risk to life; needs attention today.
- High — serious harm reported or clearly imminent for many people.
- Moderate — real harm, contained scale, or a system failure with delayed effect.
- Low — noteworthy for the record; no present indication of harm at scale.
Severity is the reviewer's judgement of the reported situation, not a prediction.
Location precision
A record is only pinned as precisely as the source allows. The precision label always travels with the coordinates.
- Approximate (APPROX)
- District level (DISTRICT)
- Exact location (EXACT)
- State level (STATE)
- If the source does not say where, the record reads “Location not stated in the source.” — we do not guess.
- A pin a reviewer moved is marked corrected, with a note saying why.
Personal information
Summaries carry no personal identifiers. Before a record can be published the reviewer must confirm this, and the form refuses to approve while it can still match an Indian mobile number, an email address, an Aadhaar number or a PAN. Institutions, hospitals and ministries are named; people are not.
Escalation
Some records are not ours to publish on the spot. If any of these apply, the reviewer can only escalate:
- Names a specific private facility or company — Private entity named
- Legal, defamation or national-security sensitivity — Legal/security sensitivity
- Unverified social-media rumour only — Single unverified source
- Deaths or mass-casualty event — Fatalities involved
- Named individual or patient is identifiable — PII / identifiable person
Review, corrections and retractions
- Every decision is written to a ledger: who, when, the rationale, the confidence, and the seconds spent.
- One reviewer at a time holds a record; the lock expires after fifteen minutes of inactivity.
- Published records are never quietly edited. Changes appear in the corrections log.
- A retracted record keeps its permalink and is labelled as retracted, so an old citation still resolves.
Using and citing the register
- Every record and every filtered view carries a citation in ten styles, including BibTeX, RIS and CSL-JSON.
- Read-only API:
/api/search, /api/signal/{id}, /api/meta, /api/corrections, /api/stats, /api/cite, /api/export. - Feed: /feed.xml. Sitemap: /sitemap.xml.
- Licence: CC BY 4.0 — attribution required. The register is public and Not for Sale!