[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 bride when I went to my in-law’s employer’s house and touched their feet, they took a huge offence. They abused my family and rebuked me for having the audacity to ...

[By Narendra Kaushik] New Delhi: Former Haryana Chief Bhupinder Singh Hooda, who is sitting on a peace fast at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, wants Manohar Lal Khattar-led BJP government to immediately find a solution to the ongoing Jat agitation for reservation. Ask him what that solution can be and he simply clams up. Hooda very well knows that whatever ...

[By Pushpa Achanta] Kolar – “The main drinking water pipeline and tank has been built because of the relentless efforts of our women’s collective. That is the reason why this water is called ‘Magazheer Neer’, Tamil for water generated by women. At present, the local panchayat monitors the water supply between 8 to 10 am daily. Each household can manage ...

[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, a do-gooder who has performed Haj over a dozen and a half times, and their colleagues pick up jute bags and spread out into different directions of the city. They ...

[By Shashi Tharoor] NEW DELHI – On January 17, Rohith Vemula, a PhD candidate at the University of Hyderabad in India’s Telangana state, hanged himself. Even in a country of 1.2 billion people, a single death can have a major impact. Vemula was a Dalit – a member of what was once known as the “untouchables,” at the bottom of ...

[Monica Grady] There is nothing more certain in life than death – a cheerful thought for a dismal February. Even though we are aware of that inevitability, we don’t expect death literally to strike out of an empty sky, which reportedly is what happened to Kamraj, a bus driver in Vellore, a town in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. ...

[By Mari Marcel Thekaekara|New Internationalist] My grandparents and parents trekked through parts of Burma to escape the advancing Japanese army during the Second World War. So we were brought up on stories of starvation and deprivation. ‘We carried gold and jewellery but there was no decent rice to be had. Not even if you had all the gold in the ...

[By Brahma Chellaney] Berlin– Containing the scourge of Islamist terror will be impossible without containing the ideology that drives it: Wahhabism, a messianic, jihad-extolling form of Sunni fundamentalism whose international expansion has been bankrolled by oil-rich sheikhdoms, especially Saudi Arabia. That is why the newly announced Saudi-led anti-terror coalition, the Islamic Military Alliance to Fight Terrorism, should be viewed with ...

[By Mark Graham, University of Oxford] Who could possibly be against free internet access? This is the question that Mark Zuckerberg asks in a piece for the Times of India in which he claims Facebook’s Free Basics service “protects net neutrality”. Free Basics is the rebranded Internet.org, a Facebook operation where by partnering with local telecoms firms in the developing world ...

[By Chetna Verma] Agra – The young thrive on dreams for a brighter tomorrow. Most aspire to have a comfortable home, a rewarding career and a loving family – and they work hard to put together the pieces of this perfect life, bit-by-bit. But what if one never even got a decent shot at fulfilling one’s ambitions or breaking free ...