News stories by Sujoy Dhar, page 3

In a remote Indian village in the Western state of Maharashtra, a fourth-grader named Suraj Balu Zore proudly told IPS that he can now effortlessly operate a laptop computer.

Ajay Shrivastav from Bhopal, the central Indian city that witnessed one of the worst industrial disasters of the world in 1984 from a deadly gas leak, is an angry man seeking justice.

In his Independence Day address to the nation on Aug. 15 Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh vowed to fight corruption, but nationwide agitations since then demanding an effective ombudsman to check graft showed an unconvinced public.

Hastimal Sen mistook the deafening sounds of explosions that shook his office in Mumbai’s crowded Zaveri Bazaar Wednesday evening as cars backfiring.

Thirteen-year-old Jamal is a Bangladeshi bootlegger who carries goods from Haridaspur town in the Indian state of West Bengal to the border district of Jessore in southwest Bangladesh, playing cat-and-mouse with Indian frontier guards every day.

Fourteen-year-old Satikanta Sahu loves going to school, but these days, he would rather spend his time manning the barricade and facing down policemen in the sandy coastal village of Govindpur in India’s eastern state of Orissa.

More than a decade ago, when India’s first lesbian-themed film - ‘Fire’ by Deepa Mehta - was released, it was booed and met with protest and vandalism, forcing many fear-stricken theatre owners to take the film off their screens.

In a secluded hospital bed in this bustling Indian metropolis, a woman who has lain brain dead for 37 years after a brutal sexual assault is at the centre of a national debate on mercy killing.

When it comes to sports, India has always cheered for Brazil in soccer. Now come another three cheers, this time for South Africa in cricket. The reason: a South African named Gary Kirsten who coached India to win the Cricket World Cup this year, for the first time in 28 years.

The cheapest car in the world proved the costliest for a 34-year-old Left Front CPI-M government in India’s eastern state of West Bengal, as the Indian communists lost the elections here by a wide margin.