Isolated agrarian communities in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu were hard hit by the pandemic, experiencing increased poverty, the diversion of savings toward healthcare, and prolonged illness, forcing families to pull their daughters out of school and marry them off. Years later, attendance rates haven't recovered, and child marriages haven't subsided.
India's judiciary may finally be experiencing a long-overdue reckoning on the hostile environment for women civil servants, one marked by systemic harassment, intimidation, institutional abandonment, and arbitrary dismissal.
Villagers often work in the mines, one of the only employers in Budhpura, and nearly all of them are eventually diagnosed with silicosis, a fatal and incurable lung disease. With their husbands gone and no alternative income sources to support themselves and their children, widows join the same profession that killed their husbands.
At long last, same-sex marriage could soon be recognized under Indian law. As of April 18 of this year, a total of 18 petitions have now been introduced to the high court to legalize same-sex marriage.
While India is one of the few countries yet to criminalize marital rape, the high court recently ruled that victims of marital rape are entitled to a safe and legal abortion, establishing in Indian law that non-consensual sex can and does exist among married partners.
On August 15, as India was celebrating the 75th anniversary of its independence, 11 men convicted of gang-raping a Muslim woman in 2002 were granted premature release from their life sentences.
After a scathing experience in one of India's top media houses, Meena Kotwal, a Dalit journalist, founded The Mooknayak, an independent online media outlet that reports on caste oppression and systemic violence against marginalized communities across India.
Anti-Muslim violence and hate speech have become normalized under the ruling Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), but activists say that the attacks against India’s Muslims have ratcheted up over the last year — particularly, against Muslim women.
Using funds from her own pocket, one retired schoolteacher has been providing free education for children in one Indian slum for the last 13 years.
Last September, as India braced itself for another deadly Covid-19 wave amid the upcoming festival season, “La Beauté & Style salon” — the country’s first-ever salon run and managed by trans men — quietly opened its doors in the heart of a bustling market in Ghaziabad, in the capital of New Delhi.
Sanitation work in India still involves illegal manual labor, with as many as 1.3 million Indians from certain caste groups employed as 'manual scavengers,' who load waste onto baskets or metal troughs to carry off for disposal. Not only is the work detrimental to their long-term health, but it’s also a cause for inhumane discrimination, which not only affects how they’re treated out in society but also their pursuit of alternative livelihoods.
For nearly four decades, Baba Wayil, a small Muslim village situated on the foothills of the snowclad Zabarwan Range in Indian-administered Kashmir, has cultivated fame for its blanket ban on dowries and lavish weddings.
New proposed legislation from Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state in India, is being criticized by population and public health experts as not only unnecessary but discriminatory—particularly, against the state’s Muslim minority.
More than 80 women had their names and pictures posted without their consent on the app’s “deals of the day.” Rather than hosting actual transactions, the sole purpose of the app was to humiliate its subjects.
Women who participated in anti-CAA protests nearly two years ago continue to be targeted by law enforcement, bearing the full brunt of the security apparatus or facing aggressive intimidation.
In Kashmir, a longstanding history of mistrust with the Indian central government stands in the way of more people getting vaccinated — including pregnant women, who are among the most vulnerable to COVID-19.
Overburdened and underpaid, India’s health workers, known as accredited social health activists (ASHAs) — all of whom are women — continue to work without sufficient PPE kits, facing harassment and stigma.
Pregnant workers in the tea gardens of Assam, a northeastern state in India, lack access to basic health care facilities, much less to the comprehensive maternity care they need to ensure healthy pregnancies. And the confluence of poverty, lack of access, and lack of awareness speak to why the state's maternal mortality ratio is double that of India's average and the highest in the country.
The “love jihad” bill is yet another attempt by Hindu nationalists to demean and malign the Muslim population by portraying Muslim men as sexual predators who commit jihad by converting Hindu women to Islam.
A cocktail of structural barriers with law enforcement and throughout the judicial process — such as drawn-out, humiliating investigations and trials — ensures that justice for victims remains evasive.
A new study predicts that there will be 6.8 million fewer female births compared to male births in India between 2017 to 2030, due to the country’s strong preference for sons and falling fertility rates.
Media coverage of sexual violence in India, both domestically and globally, has ignored the vast majority of rapes. Obscured from public view by the media, those stories that don’t make national and global headlines face near-insurmountable hurdles to justice.
Cases under India’s Protection of Children from Sexual Offenses Act are meant to be fast-tracked, but the reality of the judicial system's backlog often means that those cases can drag on for years. One of Delhi's most infamous and horrific rape cases is among them. Amid the long slog of court appearances, postponements — and now, the pandemic — a child victim grows up.
When an Instagram private group of twenty schoolboys from Delhi's elite schools fantasizing and degrading their female classmates went viral, it was supposed to offer a cultural reckoning for India's teens about misogyny and gendered violence. Then, it took a dark turn.
Since India went under a strict countrywide lockdown, the mostly women who make their living selling flowers, fruits, and fish every day on thoroughfares and platforms don’t know how they’ll feed their families.