“That space on the wall, that is the cradle, the first stop to the Unique Home,” says a playful four-year-old girl pointing to a shelf built into the boundary wall of the home. An alarm is set off when a newborn girl is placed there, marking the beginning of celebrations on the arrival of yet another addition to Parkash Kaur's Unique Home at Jalandhar in Punjab. Mother of 60 adopted girls,...

Maharashtra has been struggling with a declining child sex ratio and is ranked among the five worst states in the country. The reasons are the same as elsewhere: preference for a male child. But in a shocking indicator of how extreme this desire is and how deep-rooted the bias against the girl child can get, scores of families across Maharashtra have simply named their daughters ‘Nakushi’ or ‘Nakusha’—meaning ‘unwanted’ in...

-PTI   Questions were raised on Sunday about the use of funds donated by the public to Team Anna with Swami Agnivesh alleging that money was deposited in the trust run by Arvind Kejriwal from which the names of major team members were missing, a claim dismissed as made “out of anger”. Besides Team Anna detractor Swami Agnivesh, another former member ‘Waterman’ Rajinder Singh also raised the issue urging Mr. Kejriwal to come...

It has been a long and difficult road to justice for the tribal residents of this village in Tamil Nadu's Dharmapuri district The injustice done to the tribal people of India is a shameful chapter in our country's history. The tribals were called ‘rakshas' (demons), ‘asuras', and what not. They were slaughtered in large numbers, and the survivors and their descendants were degraded, humiliated, and all kinds of atrocities inflicted on...

Rudrapur, an industrial town in Uttarakhand, witnesses large-scale rioting and clashes of a communal nature. THE Garhwal and Kumaon regions, which constitute the tiny hill State of Uttarakhand, were totally free of communal disturbances even when the entire country was in the grip of tension following the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in 1992 and the Mumbai blasts in 1993. These regions had always maintained communal peace. But on...