India

In the early hours of October 31, 1876, there was a terrible convergence of storm, tide and full moon in the Bay of Bengal. Its immediate effect was to send a giant wave, 12 metres high, over the low lying islands and coastal areas.

A United Nations report has called for an investigation of human rights violations in the divided South Asian territory of Kashmir.

As cases of grave sexual violence against women continue to make headlines in India, another grim story has surfaced. A recently published study found that sex discrimination in the South Asian country kills more than 200,000 girls under the year of five-years-old annually.

A sea of red swept the Indian state of Maharastra as tens of thousands of farmers joined the Long March to demand agrarian reform, with protesters reaching Mumbai, India’s financial capital. In response, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has agreed to resolve the farmers' issues within six months.

Protesters gathered in New Delhi, India, to protest against the 2018 national budget released by the right-wing Bhartiya Janta Party government, labelling it “anti-people” and “anti-labour”.

Crop varieties have been selected and reproduced over thousands of years by farmers, creating great diversity. India, for example, used to have 200,000 varieties of rice. Seeds were kept each year for replanting and exchanging in what was a free or low-cost system for many farmers.