-SabrangIndia.in In Pratapgarh, a village that could be anywhere in the Hindi belt, a young man, Ravi, gets to know that his wife, Seema, is pregnant with a girl child, third time in a row. He wants her to get an abortion because he wants a male child. He forces Seema to accompany him to a doctor who agrees to conduct the abortion though the foetus is past the 20-week deadline...

-ThePrint.in IGP Mamta Singh says since most rapists are known to victims, the problem seems to be that women and their families have ‘too much faith’ in men around them. Chandigarh: Haryana has witnessed nine cases of rape in the past one week alone, raising serious questions about the competence of the police, their sensitivity to such crimes and the larger issue of the increased targeting of women in a state known...

-The Indian Express A water-scarce region, Bundelkhand has been battling drought, debt and poverty for over a decade. In the past three years, “anna pashu (stray cattle)” has been added to the list, now building up to a serious crisis. The cattle have started endangering the Rabi crop. Hamirpur (Uttar Pradesh): On December 25, to mark former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s birthday with ‘gau sewa’, Uma Kant, the director of BNV...

-TheWire.in The biometric identification agency and the government need to start listening to those who are pointing out critical flaws instead of issuing blanket denials and template answers. It is no surprise that the latest data and security breach surrounding the Aadhaar biometric programme has been selectively denied by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), the government of India and the Bharatiya Janata Party. All three have slammed news reports, calling it...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The National Human Rights Commission has called the Uttar Pradesh police "an organised gang of criminals", quoting a half-century-old Allahabad High Court observation, while hearing charges of wrongful detention, sexual assault, false implication and cover-up against the cops. "There is not a single lawless group in the whole of the country whose record of crime comes anywhere near the record of that single organised unit which is known...