-The Hindu Girls won’t marry into any family from Gudatipally in Telangana that is about to be submerged GUDATIPALLY (Telangana): Apart from the usual challenges of making a decent living, young men from Gudatipally village in Telangana’s Siddipet district are faced with a unique problem: they cannot find girls to marry. The reason? None of them have a convincing answer to a simple question from the father of the bride: ‘Where will...

-The Hindu Considered a ‘cousin’ of Madhubani Mithila, but perhaps closer to Bengal’s Kantha work On a late winter morning a group of women — Pinki Devi, Khusbu, Chanchala, Sunita, Nutan and Bhibha Devi among them — sit on a large, grimy, black tarpaulin sheet in the part-shadow of a slouching tree in Bhusra village in Bihar’s Muzaffarpur district. In their hands are colourful fabrics on which are emerging stories told through chain...

-The Times of India Nineteen-year-old Radha Dhanewale is one of the most eligible brides in Maharashtra’s Solapur. Families of prospective grooms arrive at the family’s tiny house every day. It’s not her education, horoscope or income that puts her at the top of the list — it’s a ‘bidi card’ she holds. “I have rolled bidis with my mother since my school days. A few years ago, I got a bidi card from...

-The Indian Express In zones of prosperity, agriculture faces crisis, jobs are few, social aspirations don’t match economic realities After Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, farmers from Rajasthan came out on the streets demanding loan waiver and implementation of the Swaminathan Committee report. Protesting against government policies and demanding their share in the country’s development, which they argue have been denied to them, the farmers have shown unity across caste and class lines....

-The Indian Express Section 375 of the IPC dealing with rape makes an exception for such instances within marriages and holds that “sexual intercourse by a man with his own wife, the wife not being under 15 years of age, is not rape” STATING THAT what “may appear to be marital rape” to a wife “may not appear so to others”, the central government took a stand against criminalising marital rape, in...