-The Hindu Kuala Lumpur: The horrific gang-rape of a young paramedical student in New Delhi on December 16, 2012 overshadowed India's achievements at the three-day Women Deliver conference that concluded here on Thursday. The episode figured in discussions held over three days even as the Indian delegates attempted to highlight the successes made in improving the reproductive and child health. On Wednesday morning, when philanthropist Melinda Gates acknowledged the achievements of the Bihar...

-The Hindu     Residents cannot believe they will get Hogenakkal scheme water from today Hogenakkal (Dharmapuri): Fifty-one-year-old Unnamalai of Mangarai at Pennagaram in Dharmapuri district breaks into a smile at the prospect of getting potable water from Wednesday under the Rs.1,928-crore Hogenakkal Water Supply Scheme and Fluorosis Mitigation Project. It has been such a long wait that she and many others in the rural areas of Hogenakkal cannot believe that the scheme has been...

-The Hindu Allahabad: Breaking the chains of tradition, more than a hundred widows who live an isolated and tough life in the narrow alleys of Varanasi, on Monday shared a common platform with Hindu seers and scholars, and even dined with them. The seers and sanskrit scholars converged on the holy city to explore ways of addressing the plight of widows. They quoted from the Dharm Shastra and Samaj Shastra, ancient Hindu...

-The Hindu     The killings of Mahendra Karma and his colleagues call not for retributive violence but for a deeper reflection on the discontent among the tribals of central India and their dispossession In the summer of 2006, I had a long conversation with Mahendra Karma, the Chhattisgarh Congress leader who was killed in a terror attack by the Naxalites last week. I was not alone - with me were five other members...

-The Hindu Jaipur: The nondescript Jasauti village in Pahari tehsil of Bharatpur district, situated at the Rajasthan-Haryana border, has emerged as the "Bhindi Gaon" (village of lady's fingers), sending over a dozen vehicles with the popular vegetable everyday for six months in a year to Gurgaon and Delhi. Eighty per cent of agriculturists in the village are engaged in the farming of lady's fingers. The transformation in both the social and...