-BBC Not so long ago, Birubala Rabha believed witches existed. Assam: Growing up, neighbours often told her about evil women, or daini (witches) skulking in the village. Ms Rabha was six when her father died, forcing her to drop out of school to help her mother, a farm worker in India's north-eastern Assam state. She was 15 when she got married to a farmer. Ms Rabha mostly stayed at home, weaving and looking after their...

-The Indian Express Jhargram: Even as people return, a steady out-migration, especially of agricultural labour and farmers, continues from the region that has seen poor rain for years now. Taralata Mahato (25) draws awed whispers from women of Jhambeda village in West Midnapore’s Jhargram block as the only one from the village in the police. Taralata lives in a pucca two-storey house with whitewashed walls and a huge cowshed — a palatial home...

-The Indian Express Section 375 of IPC, which deals with rape, makes an exception for such instances within marriages. It holds that “sexual intercourse by a man with his own wife, the wife not being under 15 years of age, is not rape”. In her first statement following her ministry’s controversial reply to Rajya Sabha on marital rape, Woman and Child Development (WCD) Minister Maneka Gandhi has said that her ministry could...

-BBC Kalawati Devi Rawat is known as the woman who brought electricity to her remote village in the hills of the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand, writes BBC Hindi's Salman Ravi. It was the early 1980s and she had just been married and moved to Bacher village to live with her husband. The village had no electricity and she found life tough once it got dark in the hills. One day, she led a...

-The Hindu More than a year after 13 women died in a mass sterilisation camp in Chhattisgarh, it is far from clear whether lessons have been learnt or justice done Sixteen months after a mass sterilisation camp conducted by the government of Chhattisgarh resulted in 13 deaths and 65 injuries, viscera reports — from the Central Forensic Science Laboratory in Ramanthapur, Hyderabad, and from the Central Drugs Laboratory, Kolkata, to go with...