Each night, as temperatures continue to plunge and Delhi shivers through its coldest winter in the last decade, a few more people lose their lives on its streets. The people who succumb to the cold include rickshaw-pullers, balloon-sellers and casual workers, the footloose underclass of dispossessed people who build and service the capital city of the country and yet are forced to sleep under the open sky. They die because...

Unauthorized medical practitioners find business where Bihar’s health machinery deserts polio victims Two-year-old Khushi Kumari loves racing with her siblings and at the end of each run she gives out a hearty laugh. The only time she breaks into fits of inconsolable crying is when approached by a stranger. “She fears she would get injections again,” said her mother Dinapati Yadav of Haldichapra village in Patna district. “In September last year...

Kabul (Reuters): Dozens of Indian labourers have been forced to take refuge in a Sikh temple in Kabul after job agents who promised lucrative jobs in the unstable capital disappeared, leaving the men penniless and without passports. Billions of dollars in western military contracts have turned Afghanistan — long a source of refugees fleeing chronic conflict — into an unlikely magnet for migrant workers willing to risk their lives for a...

Matriculate Trained Teachers, who make up 87% of school teachers in India, get Rs 775 in UP Rs 892 in Assam and Rs 1,507 per month in Punjab. Even in the most highly rated schools, the average salary is Rs. 7,225 p.m. Nearly 200,000 teachers in Bihar draw a salary less than that of a peon in the government. Teachers with post graduate degrees teaching primary to higher secondary levels, draw...

THANTIRAYANKUPPAM, INDIA — Five years ago, I woke up on a Sunday morning, checked the news online and saw that a tsunami had hit my part of the world. Early reports were sketchy. I read about just a few casualties (in Sri Lanka, as I recall), and I remember thinking that the whole thing sounded exciting. I went down to the beach, about a 15-minute drive from my house. I walked...