They have all been killed quietly, leaving Devda just with 20 girls compared to 300 boys Avon Kanwar lives in fear. She is scared her food may be poisoned. She is afraid to sleep at night because she suspects she may be strangled. Avon, eight years old, is convinced her parents will kill her. “I don’t know where she hears such things,”says her father Sangh Singh, “We stopped killing girls...

When a farmer named Praveen Gawankar and two neighbors began a protest four years ago against a proposed nuclear power plant here in this coastal town, they were against it mainly for not-in-my-backyard reasons. They stood to lose mango orchards, cashew trees and rice fields, as the government forcibly acquired 2,300 acres to build six nuclear reactors — the biggest nuclear power plant ever proposed anywhere. But now, as a nuclear...

The Orissa government has given its consent for a CBI inquiry into the alleged multi-crore rural job scam under Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). "We have given consent for a CBI probe into the alleged irregularities under MGNREGA," chief secretary B K Patnaik said. He said the ministry of rural development had asked the state government to give its consent on a specific format before a notification was issued...

A three-day Tarapur-Jaitapur anti-nuclear plant yatra was stopped the moment it began and hundreds of activists were detained at Boisar in this district on Saturday. Activists and supporters, including Justices (retired) B G Kolse-Patil and P.B. Sawant, social activist Vaishali Patil, and Admiral (retd) L Ramdas, were whisked away in police vans from Panchmarg Tarapur, where they had addressed a public meeting in the morning. They were brought to the Boisar...

Last week, the Supreme Court granted bail to Binayak Sen, the doctor and civil rights activist who had been sentenced to life imprisonment by a court in Raipur on the charge of sedition. Sen was charged with being a Naxalite sympathizer, and of acting as a courier for the Communist Party of India (Maoist). The verdict of the lower court had been widely condemned. The proceedings were farcical; with no...