In the 1920s, a young Tamil girl sang and starred in her school musical. It was, ostensibly, a private event with few outsiders. Yet so exceptional was her singing that Swadesamitran ran her photograph and wrote about the event. Seeing that photo in the newspaper, her household “was appalled” for, as the music historian V Sriram writes, “good, chaste women never had their photographs published in papers”. Today, this seems like...

India's 2011 census shows a serious decline in the number of girls under the age of seven - activists fear eight million female foetuses may have been aborted in the past decade. The BBC's Geeta Pandey in Delhi explores what has led to this crisis. Kulwant has three daughters aged 24, 23 and 20 and a son who is 16. In the years between the birth of her third daughter and her...

Bhatta Parsaul was once a quiet farming village but now, as it finds itself at the centre of a major political row, it is strewn with mounds of ash, burnt-out motorcycles, tractors and cars. In early May villagers here clashed with armed police who tried to break up a four-month-old sit-in protest at the village. They had been fighting the terms of the acquisition of their farmland in the Greater Noida...

The National Commission for women (NCW) on Saturday backed Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi's claim of mass killing and rape by the police in Greater Noida villages after protests over land acquisition. The NCW alleged that women were molested, stripped and raped and people were burnt alive, and sought a CBI probe to “bring out the truth.” The charge came a day after the All-India Democratic women's Association said it found...

-PTI   Congress leader and Union minister Sachin Pilot was on Sunday arrested and then released by Uttar Pradesh Police while he was on his way to violence-hit Bhatta-Parsaul to meet families of farmers injured in the recent agitation on land acquisition. Union minister of state for information technology Pilot, along with around 100 supporters, first went to Dasna jail to meet farmers from Bhatta and Parsaul villages lodged there since the...