Stories written by Sujoy Dhar
One of IPS’s regular India-based writers for many years, Sujoy Dhar is an India correspondent with the Washington Times. He is the founder-editor of news agency India Blooms News Service and feature service Trans World Features, a columnist with Pakistan's Newsline magazine and a correspondent for PAN in Afghanistan. Sujoy also writes for a host of other Indian and international publications.
| Web
Although forced prostitution and trafficking of women remains a huge challenge in India, health experts, policy-makers and legal advocates say that most of the country’s estimated four million commercial sex workers join the trade of their own free will.
It was 9:45 pm when 23-year-old Manira Chaudhury, a final-year Master’s student in New Delhi, who was traveling home in a rickshaw, pressed a button on her smart phone that sent out emergency alerts to two of her closest friends.
Ramanjareyulu, a 55-year-old farmer from the southern India state of Andhra Pradesh, has been struggling to find his feet ever since inadequate rainfall dealt a blow to his harvest of groundnut and red gram (a pulse crop that grows primarily in India).
As hundreds of legislators descend on Mexico City for the second GLOBE Summit, slated to run from Jun. 6-8, many rising nations are taking stock of their national policies in relation to climate change and global warming.
On the outskirts of Rudraprayag, a town in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand whose many temples draw tourists and Hindu pilgrims with magnetic force, visitors often stop for a meal at a popular hotel built right on the river Alakananda.
They chopped down trees and used them to barricade the road, then retreated into the dense forests of the remote Sukma district, located in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh, to await their quarry.
When a five-year-old was rescued from the basement of a building in the eastern part of India’s capital, New Delhi, the doctors treating her were horrified to find the little girl had not only been raped by two men several times, but the perpetrators had also inflicted severe perineal injuries by inserting foreign objects into her body.
Her face covered with a maroon scarf and with large old -fashioned goggles hiding her eyes, Sonali Mukherjee lived one of the most cherished moments of her life when she earned a jackpot on a show hosted by Indian film star Amitabh Bachchan.
“I am godless. I am an artist. I will find another country that is secular and will take me…” These are the emotional words of one of India's most famous and critically acclaimed actors, Kamal Haasan, who ran from one court to another to get his 17 million dollar trilingual film Vishwaroopam (Universe) released in his home state Tamil Nadu in south India last month.
On a chilly Wednesday evening, exactly a month after a young woman was gang-raped and brutalised on a moving bus in New Delhi, hundreds of sombre citizens gathered at a candlelight protest in India’s national capital.
While a 23-year-old woman battles for life in a New Delhi hospital after she was gang raped and brutalised on a moving bus in India's prosperous national capital earlier this month, women across the nation say they live in constant fear of sexual assault.
In a small dingy room on the edge of a brothel in west Kolkata, capital of the eastern Indian state of West Bengal, a 42-year-old former sex worker is trying to eke out a living selling cooked food in her neighbourhood, while tending to her sick husband and a paralysed son.
Thousands of shopkeepers in Sir Stuart Hogg Market in Kolkata, the business hub of eastern India’s biggest city, are all talking about one thing: what they will do when multinational companies invade their ancient marketplace.
Bare-chested and beaming in the company of many like him, London-based male sex worker Thierry Schaffauser wipes the beads of sweat trickling down his face on a humid Kolkata evening, and slams U.S. President Barack Obama.
A young professional in India’s burgeoning IT hub Gurgaon, a major satellite city of national capital New Delhi, Manideepa Moitra works as a software content writer not just to make a living but to secure a career in the demanding sector that catapulted India on the global outsourcing industry map.
While India’s largest left outfit, the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M), was licking its electoral wounds, a newly-elected regime in West Bengal was busy chopping chapters on Marxism and the Bolshevik Revolution out of high school syllabi, in celebration of breaking CPI-M’s 34-year stronghold over the state.
Sahara Bibi, a 47-year-old poor Muslim woman living on one of the climate- impacted islands of Eastern India’s fragile Sundarbans archipelago in West Bengal state, was forced to pull her two young sons out of school and send one of them to the Southern state of Kerala to earn a decent income.
India's premier political dynasty - the Nehru Gandhi clan - has failed to charm voters in elections held across five states in the country, including the key Hindi heartland state of Uttar Pradesh.
At the intensive care unit of the state-run All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) hospital in New Delhi, a two-year-old battered baby girl is fighting to survive.
At the intensive care unit of the state-run All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) hospital in New Delhi, a two-year-old battered baby girl is fighting to survive.