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Live: Elections 2017

Most exit polls forecast a saffron Holi in Uttar Pradesh and a close fight between the Congress seeking to return to power in Punjab and AAP, a debutant in Punjab elections. Stay with us for LIVE updates on Assembly Elections 2017. ...
Fan of Rudyard Kipling? Then you should read the hundreds of other stories he wrote

[By Sarah Lonsdale] Sixteen-year-old Rudyard Kipling returned to India after a miserable childhood, and slightly less miserable adolescence in England, to take up the perfect job for a precociously gifted but possibly unemployable son of empire. He w...
Why India’s persecuted tribes are marking their alternative independence day

[By Sarah Gandee] In the minutes before the clock struck midnight on August 14-15 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, made a now-hallowed speech to the nation on the eve of its independence: Long years ago, we made a tryst with...
India’s Cow Vigilantes

[By Shashi Tharoor] NEW DELHI – Indian politics continues to amaze and appall. The surge in cow vigilantism – a uniquely Indian phenomenon that has lately begun to flourish under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government – is no exception. Many ort...
India’s GST promises growth, reform and opportunities

[By Milind Sathye] The passing of the India’s Goods and Services Tax (GST) constitution amendment bill through the Upper House is not only a shot in the arm for the country’s economic growth and a historical reform in its tax system, it also presents...
Gujarati vigilante violence on Dalits sparks protest

[By Mari Marcel Thekaekara | New Internationalist] In India, Dalits are killed over and over again. Every single day. Beaten, tortured, murdered, raped, stripped and paraded naked through the streets of their villages and towns, forced to drink urine...
From Kashmir and Chilcot to Black Lives Matter

[By Mari Marcel Thekaekara| New Internationalist] Mob throws police jeep into river. One cop dead. My first reaction was, another US story about the eruption of violence post-the Black Lives Matter protests. But no. This was the morning’s headlines i...
India’s Jewel in the Crown

|By Shashi Tharoor| NEW DELHI – India’s Solicitor-General, Ranjit Kumar, recently declared that India would not seek the return of the Kohinoor diamond – one of the world’s oldest and most valuable – from the British, to whom India had “gifted” it. T...
Bangalored: Death of a Dream

[By Mari Marcel Thekaekara|New Internationalist] Once upon a time, possibly around two, definitely three decades ago, Bangalore was a charming little town. It was known as the pensioners’ paradise because it was a tiny town with quaint cottages and p...

Talking Points

Justice for Jisha | Credit : sabrangindia.in

Kerala – a conflict of cultures?

pb7editor May 15, 2016 Leave a comment

[By Mari Marcel Thekaekara|New Internationalist] Kerala has long been held up as an example of a model state. India’s most educated piece of paradise. But people who live there, in ...

Asia’s Troubled Water

Team PB7 April 26, 2016 Leave a comment

[By Brahma Chellaney] NEW DELHI – Asia’s water woes are worsening. Already the world’s driest continent in per capita terms, Asia now faces a severe drought that has parched a ...

Overcoming India’s Official Homophobia

pb7editor April 13, 2016 Leave a comment

[By Shashi Tharoor] NEW DELHI – Sixty-six years after adopting one of the world’s most liberal constitutions, India is being convulsed by a searing debate over a colonial-era provision in ...

A dalit manual scavenging | Source: Punjabiportal.com

Drowning in liquid filth – in 21st century India

Team PB7 March 28, 2016 Leave a comment

We pretend that people are not condemned to the caste system, Mari Marcel Thekaekara writes. In 1996, I listened in disbelief as Martin Macwan, a dalit leader, told a Delhi gathering, ...

Confessions Of A Pakistani National

Team PB7 March 28, 2016 Leave a comment

Anyone who has ever traveled abroad will tell you that no matter where you go, no matter how developed the country it is that you’re travelling to, if you are ...

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Building A Life Beyond Manual Scavenging

Team PB7 February 28, 2016 Leave a comment

[By Elsa Mathews] Alwar – Sunita Nanda, 30, still remembers the day she was thrown out of the ‘jajman’s’ (patron) house. She recounts the painful encounter, “As a newly married ...

Bundeli Samaj segregating food collected from households

Roti Bank : A lifeline for the poor in Bundelkhand

Team PB7 February 12, 2016 Leave a comment

[By Narendra Kaushik] Mahoba: Every evening as the clock strikes 7 O’clock, Tara Patkar, a journalist who quit the profession in January 2014 to take up public causes, Haji Muttan, ...

$There is very little data on women’s ownership of land and assets even though it is an area that is very significant, particularly because it is inter-twined with many other dimensions of women’s lives. (Credit: Subhrajit Dutta Mallick\WFS)$

The Number Game: Using Data To Enable Women’s Empowerment

Team PB7 September 8, 2015 Leave a comment

[By Amrita Nandy] New Delhi (WFS) – Severe arthritis has left Shanti, 68, nearly disabled. Bent with age, she limps through her days in acute pain, barely being able to ...

Members of the Kishori Mandal in Ranchi district get
together once every week to review their micro-credit accounting and
then discuss issues like eating healthy meals or standing up against child marriage. (Credit: Ajitha MenonWFS)

Teenage Girls Generate Wealth To Secure Health

Team PB7 August 17, 2015 Leave a comment

[By Ajitha Menon] Ranchi (WFS) – ‘Kal Baisakhi’, or Nor’westers, originate in the Chhotanagpur Plateau, in and around areas like Ranchi and Jamshedpur in Jharkhand, in the months of April ...

Tell your story; Join Our Better World’s Good Story Pitch

July 22, 2015 Leave a comment

Are you pursuing social change in India? Point Blank 7 invites you to join Our Better World’s Good Story Pitch to get your story told. Why would you need your ...

Awesome Superheroes Give You the Power

Team PB7 June 29, 2015 Leave a comment

“He really believes he is the Whisperer,” Lisa Sun says of her son, Benjamin. The seven-year-old used to be afraid to speak up. Now, “he is much braver and compassionate”, ...

Skype These Kids to Help Them Read

Team PB7 June 17, 2015 Leave a comment

Yans Ganghadaran wanted to help a community near her home in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. So she offered some literacy lessons. In no time, there were 50 kids were “clambering on ...

Mothers Light Up Indonesia

Team PB7 May 28, 2015 Leave a comment

Thousands of people have been impacted by Nusantara Development Initative’s (NDI) project to empower rural women to become solar lamp entrepreneurs in Indonesia. The Singapore-registered non-profit works closely alongside island communities ...

Lord Of The BP 638

Team PB7 December 16, 2014 1 Comment

|By Col. NN Bhatia (Retd)| The Indo-Pakistani War of 1971 is synonymous with liberation of Bangladesh that commenced with Pakistan launching of Operation Chengiz Khan on 3 December 1971 through pre-emptive ...

The philosophy of the Soldier Mountaineer Colonel Narinder Kumar ‘Bull’!

Team PB7 June 4, 2015 Leave a comment

[By Col NN Bhatia | A Preface] The human spirit needs places where nature has not been rearranged by the hand of the man. – Anonymous The Regimental Centre Officers’ Mess ...

All They Wanted Was A Martyrdom Of Valour, Not Of Senseless Tragedy

Team PB7 March 6, 2014 Leave a comment

By Simran Brar The final journey begins for lives lost in vain; the wreath is laid with full guard of honour for Lt. Commander Kapish Muwal and Lt. Manoranjan Kumar ...

Eternal Vigil – POW Joe’s Story

Team PB7 December 16, 2014 Leave a comment

There is a Prisoner Of War (POW) story of my course mate Joe I would like to tell. He passed away in 2011 in Pune of brain haemorrhage. My story below ...

Cinemagoers, not just in India but across the world, have been queuing up to watch the performance of Kangana Ranaut in ‘Tanu weds Manu Returns’ (TWMR), a film that is entertaining, gripping and sans the conventional Bollywood hero.

The Box Office Goes Pink

Team PB7 June 23, 2015 Leave a comment

[By Surekha Kadapa-Bose|WFS] Mumbai – Is the face of the male-dominated Hindi film industry finally undergoing a much-needed change? If one looks at the hits of the year it certainly ...

Sidana Institutes,Khiala khurd,Ramtirath road,Ajnala,Amritsar

Dr. Jeewan Jyoti Sidana – Transforming education in Punjab

Team PB7 December 29, 2015 Leave a comment

Dr. Jeewan Jyoti Sidana runs a chain of educational institutes in Amritsar of India’s Punjab State which covers 100 villages of the border district and who has become a beacon of ...

What your wife, sister, daughter is not telling you..

March 10, 2015 Leave a comment

[By Shweta Rawal] If you are my family and reading this, please don’t get anxious, that’s not the purpose of my sharing this today. I can share this today because ...

Coolie No. 15: Jaipur Junction’s lady porter

March 8, 2015 Leave a comment

Not discouraged or disheartened; resolutely courageous, she sprints up and down stair cases each day, loading taxis, chasing customers and carrying upto 30 kilograms on her head. Working among 200 men ...