There are serious concerns over shortages of food and housing as the country's population is expected to reach 1.45bn by 2035 The Madanpur Khadr colony is a tenement slum on the southern outskirts of Delhi, the Indian capital. A decade ago there was nothing here but green fields, buffaloes wallowing, goats grazing and the odd small dwelling. Now an estimated 40,000 people live in ramshackle, five-storey, brick and concrete homes, 10 to...

Share of Big 5 rose to 66.49 % of all farm suicides in 2010 The five States with the largest share of the quarter-of-a-million farm suicides recorded in India over the past 16 years are Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. While the total number of farmers who took their own life in 2010 showed a dip from the preceding year, the share of the Big 5, in fact, rose...

Medical facilities have collapsed as encephalitis epidemic continues to rage Even as the rest of India recovers from Deepavali celebrations, residents of Poorvanchal have been marking a grim time that descends on the eastern Uttar Pradesh region each year: a time local people call the season of death. Ever since July, 470 people, mostly children, have died of viral encephalitis and its biological cousin, Japanese encephalitis — the first caused by a...

When Munni arrived in this fertile, sugarcane-growing region of north India as a young bride years ago, little did she imagine she would be forced into having sex and bearing children with her husband's two brothers who had failed to find wives. "My husband and his parents said I had to share myself with his brothers," said the woman in her mid-40s, dressed in a yellow sari, sitting in a village...

Court: if it is suspicious, it should not be acted upon without corroborative evidence A dying declaration made by a victim, accusing a person of having been responsible for his/her death, cannot form the basis of conviction if it suffers from infirmity, the Supreme Court has held. A Bench of Justices P. Sathasivam and B.S. Chauhan said, “Where a dying declaration is suspicious, it should not be acted upon without corroborative evidence....