-The Hindu We won’t allow anyone to cut our trees, say the women of Balarampur village For three generations now, and spanning 40 years, Chaturi Sahu, 70, has been unfailingly sending one male member from her family to patrol the nearby Jhinkargadi forest to ensure that its trees and shrubs are untouched. Year after year, her father-in-law, husband and son, who are part of the foot soldiers of Balarampur, a nondescript village in...

-The Indian Express They discussed verification methods through news searches, reverse image searches and fact-checking organisations as well as technical features. The question came up again and again. “If a WhatsApp message comes to the police, how can we find the original sender of the message?” asked Naveen Rana, an IT cell member from the office of the Deputy Commissioner of Police in Jaipur. “If we don’t have the data, how...

-The Indian Express Hashimpura verdict highlights the bias within police against religious minorities. It is a chilling coincidence that on October 31, a date that marks the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984 and the unleashing of state-engineered violence against the Sikhs, the Delhi High Court held 16 policemen of the 41st Battalion of UP Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) guilty of “the targeted killing by armed forces of the unarmed,...

-Outlook India In the fertile farmlands of Mandsaur, political allegiance still grows tall. As does farmers’ discontent and anger. Tractor-trolleys laden with sacks of mostly soybean form a serpentine queue outside the foodgrain mandi in Mandsaur. Farmers make their way inside in ones and twos, unpack the bags and unload their produce among  growing mounds of soybean in the wide mandi yard. A reasonably good monsoon has ensured a bountiful harvest for...

-IndiaSpend.com Dimlarpar (Bodoland Territorial Council), Assam: It was a rainy September afternoon in this remote village in Baksa, a district of the Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC) in western Assam. Outside a small tin-roofed mud house, Santi Rani Chand, a frail 72-year-old clad in a white saree, sat on a wooden bench recalling her youngest son’s suicide. Binay Chand, 32, had hanged himself from a mango tree in a neighbour’s backyard in September...