On October 18, 2017, Indian police arrested 6 teenage girls from Sindhupalchok district in Rudrapur, a city in the Indian state of Uttarakhand and handed them over to Maiti Nepal, an anti-trafficking NGO with an office in Kanchanpur. Among the victims was a 14-year-old girl. But her age in citizenship…
It is around 40° Celsius in Varanasi. Just climbing a few weathered stairs of the ghats is enough to make one wonder whether the heart is beating or the head. The slow, monotonous drum beating inside one’s body drowns all the noise of the busy chaotic ghats. Even as the…
Three years ago, when Sushila Thapa managed to flee from a brothel in Mumbai to her native village in Nepal, the big scar on her back did not matter. What mattered to her more was that she was home alive. A year later, when she saw another woman with a…
Cleaning the Ganga was a major election plank for the victorious Narendra Modi-led NDA. The same Ganga where 80% of untreated waste is dumped in from 138 open drains. So when I decided to take a journey down the river, I did what no traveller does. Instead of the ghats,…
Avtar Singh’s cataract-ridden eyes betray him. He is happy talking to the group of friends he has invited home, but he cannot help stealing fond glances at the lush green fields and trees he has grown single-handedly in the heart of a salt desert. Some consider the 92-year-old Sikh rude.…
Thirty years after the Bhopal gas tragedy, there is no justice in sight for the survivors of the world’s worst industrial disaster. To make matters worse, the authorities have no forensic evidence of the disaster. It would have proved to be the most crucial evidence in the ongoing trials and…
After the extreme rains that caused floods and claimed over 200 lives in the state, Jammu and Kashmir got some respite on Tuesday as floodwaters began to recede. But the Met office has now forecast more rains in the region in the next 48 hours, which may hamper ongoing rescue…