Modi pushes forward with building new parliament and other structures, with critics accusing him of misplaced priorities amid a raging pandemic. Barely 7km (4 miles) from the project site lies a slum dwelling called Yamuna Khadar along the Yamuna river’s floodplains in eastern Delhi’s Mayur Vihar neighbourhood. Ashok, 49, sits outside his shanty, watching the mounds of mud dug out from the Central Vista project and dumped outside their homes for the past few months.

Nearly 1.8 million people in India are homeless, and many of them do not have a phone or access to the internet, locking them out of an inoculation campaign that is largely online. India is rolling out one of the largest vaccination drives in the world, as it continues to register more than a million new COVID-19 cases every three days. As of Friday, less than 3 p

The Adivasi women issued a stern warning to the government and administration, declaring that should they fail to take action on those responsible for this atrocity and those involved in its cover-up, they would have no choice but to launch a wider full-fledged agitation for their rights. Over a thousand Adivasi women gathered in Barwani, Madhya Pradesh on February 17 to demand the arrest of 20-25 men who had barged into an Adivasi home falsely accusing them of organizing religious c

How the marginalised communities struggled to gain access to relief materials during the pandemic due to ABBA systems New Delhi: Premsila Toppo is a Khadia Adivasi woman from Sundergarh. She has both a visual and a mental disability and is entitled to a disability pension. Her family has tried to get an Aadhaar for her multiple times, but it always fails because of her visual disability. Due to PDS-Aadhaar seeding becoming mandatory, she never received rations, nor does she have access to a Jan

In Delhi's Wazirpur, two families are struggling each day to make it. Pulinder, 49, is paralysed due to an epileptic seizure. For the past two years, his wife, Asha Devi, has been supporting the family. They have a son, who has an undiagnosed ailment that leaves him weak now and then. Ms. Asha Devi wipes a tear and says, “Where should I go now? Should I buy food or medicines?” Ms. Asha Devi works in a steel line. Post the lockdown, the families have got absolutely no support from the government

New Delhi: A month ago, on April 7, Chief Justice of India S.A. Bobde asked public interest lawyer Prashant Bhushan: “If they are being provided meals, then why do they need money for meals?” Bhushan had represented a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) filed jointly by civil rights activists Harsh Mander and Anjali Bharadwaj to demand the payment of wages to migrant workers and minimum wage earners who have no income due to the lockdown and therefore no food. Given the opportunity, Laxmi could e

Ray is a transwoman in her twenties who studies law at the Faculty of Law in the University of Delhi. She used to live in her college’s hostel, but had to move in with her parents in another part of Delhi when the lockdown to contain COVID-19 was imposed across the country. Although she told her parents that she is a transwoman almost a year earlier, Ray said, this did not translate into her having space to assert her identity. Since she moved back home, she has been feeling repressed, Ray told

15-year-old Babita is from Jhansi. She came to Phalodi for work, but this unprecedented lockdown has her hustling for the most basic of needs. She got her periods five days ago, and is using ash smeared on pieces of cloth she’s tearing from the three sets of clothes she had. She said, “Bahar sote hain, baarish hoti hai tab bhi, kapde dhoke vahi pehen rahi hun.” (We sleep outside even when it rains, I wash the clothes when the blood leaks, so I can wear the same clothes again.) Speaking to The Q

New Delhi: The unprecedented lockdown to beat the novel coronavirus epidemic has placed India’s tuberculosis (TB) patients in more danger than usual as they are both at larger risk of developing a severe COVID-19 infection and have been the longstanding victims of large-scale economic marginalisation. India has the world’s highest burden of TB as well as multidrug-resistant (MDR) TB among all nations, and recently vowed to eliminate the disease by as early as 2025. The country’s urban TB epidem

Indian women and children display slogans written with henna on their palms during a protest against a new citizenship law in Bangalore, India on March 1. Photo: AP