Ajit Kumar Singh loves driving his father CP Singh’s brand new Mahindra Xylo on the potholed roads much more used to tractors carrying sugarcane in Ashokpur Tikia village of Gonda district in Uttar Pradesh. “It takes to the road in these interior regions much easily than the humble Alto we had earlier,” says the 20-year-old law student at the local degree college in Gonda, tapping his fingers on the freshly washed...

Bardani Logun sits on a plastic chair in the communal room of a hostel in Rohini, north Delhi, where she lives with her toddler, and speaks candidly about being beaten, abused and starved. She is one of countless young women from the tribal belt of India who have migrated to Delhi to find work as live-in maids, hoping to send their earnings back home to support impoverished families in Jharkhand, Orissa,...

Delhi is an anxious city this monsoon season, struggling to meet an onerous deadline. Preparations continue at a feverish pace for the 19th Commonwealth Games (CWG), which will bear down on the Indian metropolis October 3-14, along with some 8,500 athletes from the 71 states and territories that were once part of the British Empire. Around-the-clock construction and spells of heavy monsoon rain have turned Delhi into a swirl of mud...

India's hurried quest for development and its disregard for road safety have resulted in a major public health problem that demands serious thought and action. The high mortality and morbidity associated with road traffic injuries are a major public health challenge worldwide. Every year, road traffic crashes kill an estimated 1.2 million people. The figure for the injured is over 50 million. Significant increases in these estimates are projected over the...

The other day, I met a few carpet manufacturers from Mirzapur who were fuming about the state of affairs there. “In spite of the best weaving wages that we’re able to pay, far too many weavers have now turned to other jobs,” one complained. The recession in the West led to a massive slowdown in carpet exports, reducing the number of orders for weavers. Many found alternative jobs under the...