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A hotbed of political, social and romantic intrigue set amid rolling hills, no place encapsulates the global ambitions as well as the parochial desires of the Raj better than Shimla. Modern-day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma and Sri Lanka were governed from Shimla amid a whirl of colonial picnics, garden fetes, balls, plays, hunts, cocktail parties, races, ...

We find the blood tout, Rajesh, sitting on a tattered blanket next to a stall drinking milky tea from a flimsy plastic cup as monkeys traverse electrical lines overhead. Posing as the relatives of an accident victim, we tell him we need three units of blood. “Three thousand rupees ($48; £30) per donor,” Rajesh says. “I’ll ...

In the north-west of India, the business in brides is booming. Skewed sex ratios in states including Haryana, where there are only 830 girls for every 1,000 boys (pdf) and young women being lured away to jobs in India’s booming cities, means men like Yadav are increasingly left with few options when it comes to ...

In India, a plague of Ponzi schemes continue despite suicides and new laws. More than 80 people have committed suicide and hundreds of thousands of others – many already impoverished- have been defrauded in a country where there are multiple regulatory agencies, but little enforcement. Read Original    

A woman who became seriously ill at the Indian sterilisation camps that have killed 15 women has spoken of being slapped by a doctor and told to “calm down” after screaming in pain at the procedure. Shiv Kumari Yadav, 27, attended one of the clinics in Chhattisgarh, eastern India, at which antibiotics were handed out that ...

Legal relics of British rule face biggest clearout since India became independent in 1947. In India, shooting an elephant carries a fine of 500 rupees, or £5, according to a colonial law dating back to 1879. Another statute from 1878 states that anyone discovering treasure worth more than 10 rupees should not pocket it, but inform the ...