Rumors about shady practices — unethical, possibly illegal — in the Indian media have circulated for years. Over the past year or so, and especially since the 2009 parliamentary elections, when the sale of media space was reported to have reached new heights, the issue has drawn more attention.

Questions have been raised in Parliament. Last July, the Press Council of India, a government-sanctioned monitoring group, formed a two-man committee to look into the allegations. The committee completed a draft report last week that was due to be released publicly, but that release is on hold after a strong show of opposition from media owners.

Nonetheless, many of the report’s key findings have been leaked into the public domain, and they make for damning reading. Though publishers have complained that the evidence presented is weak, the report identifies several publications that are believed to have sold editorial space and it lists scores of instances in which the practice allegedly occurred.

Paranjoy Guha-Thakurta, one of the authors of the report, told me that one of its most disturbing findings was that the practice of paid content had become “institutionalized.” He said that it goes beyond individual editors or publishers, and beyond the occasional paid junket. “What started out as an individual aberration has become an illness, an epidemic of sorts,” he said. “This makes the malpractice all the more troubling.”

The commercialization of the Indian media takes many forms. It has been known for some time that a few of India’s leading media conglomerates — including Bennett, Coleman & Co., the publisher of The Times of India and The Economic Times — offer what that company calls “innovative” and “integrated” marketing strategies that blur the traditional line between advertising and article content. Bennett, Coleman’s Medianet division, for example, lets advertisers place articles on certain pages in the paper without clearly marking them as advertising.