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Despite years of robust economic growth, famine, insurgency and greed have pushed millions of people in India to the brink of starvation, especially in Jharkhand where famished children are 'cured' by branding
THE POKER is glowing red hot, flames from a small pile
of burning wood lick around it and leap into the air. Suklal Hembrom
holds a leaf against his stomach and warily eyes the man sitting on
the other side of the fire. Suddenly, Thakur Das leans forward, takes
hold of the poker and lunges towards the boy's stomach. Everyone in
the village knows what should happen next. The child will scream
loudly as the flesh begins to blister. Held down, he'll writhe in
agony. Again and again, the poker will be jabbed at his belly. The
more the child screams, the happier everyone will be, because the
villagers of Mirgitand, in the East Singhbhum district of India's
Jharkhand state, believe the distended stomachs of their famished
children can be cured by branding them with red-hot pokers.
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Gethin Chamberlain is a photojournalist covering South Asia for The Observer. He also writes for a number of other newspapers and magazines, including The Guardian, Grazia, GQ, Look, News of the World, South China Morning Post and The National. Based in India, he previously worked as a foreign correspondent for The Sunday Telegraph and as The Scotsman's chief reporter. He can be contacted at gethin.chamberlain@gmail.com |
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Workers at a factory in India have been paid just 26p an hour to make perfume bottles for England World Cup sponsor Umbro and the glamour model Katie Price, better known as Jordan. An Observer investigation found that the 7,000 employees at the factory in Gujarat are rewarded with a basic wage that is below even the minimum expected in India, and is just half the estimated minimum living wage. |
LYING howling on a torn mattress, in a cot by a window overlooking the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo, the wounded toddler was a pitiful sight. A female relative fretted, trying to calm the girl down as the medics worked around her. The 18-month-old had been shot in the stomach in the final stages of the fighting in the north-east of the country and there was an ugly line of stitches across her abdomen where doctors had operated to remove the bullet. |
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The five-year race to save India's vanishing tigers
With some conservationists claiming only 800 tigers still live in the wild, radical steps are needed if the species isn't to disappear from India within five years
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Their heads are too large or too small, their limbs too short or too bent. For some, their brains never grew, speech never came and their lives are likely to be cut short: these are the children it appears that India would rather the world did not see, the victims of a scandal with potential implications far beyond the country's borders.
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There may be scandal off the pitch and shock results on it, but the fans at the DY Patil cricket stadium are still enthralled. |
It is raining, the water dripping from roofs of tin and plastic into the pale grey ooze of the drain running down the narrow lane between the shanties that make up Bombay’s Garib Nagar slum. Rubina Ali, Slumdog Millionaire starlet and precocious 10-year-old, is skipping from one concrete slab to another, trying to avoid the stinking puddles and the filth strewn all around. It is futile: the dirt is as much a part of the slum as are its 5,000 impoverished inhabitants.
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The ash spills out across the plain beneath the brooding bulk of Niyamgiri mountain, swamping the trees that once grew here, forming dirty grey-brown drifts around the stems of the now-dead scrub. Every day there is more ash, pouring out of the alumina refinery that squats among the steep-sided, jungle-clad hills of western Orissa, India. The dust hangs in the air and clings to the landscape, settling on the huts of the aboriginal Kondh tribes who call this place home, choking those who breathe it in. |
India's growing status as an economic superpower is masking a failure to stem a shocking rate of infant deaths among its poorest people. Nearly two million children under five die every year in India – one every 15 seconds – the highest number anywhere in the world. |
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In Dantewada, in the heart of the world's biggest democracy, civil war is flaring, claiming nearly 1,000 lives in the past two years. Gethin Chamberlain reports from the jungle hideouts of the Naxal rebels who are ordering villagers to boycott the election - and whose increasing strength is straining the Indian security services to breaking point. The Observer |
IT was a little after 8pm when the water started flowing through the pipe running beneath the dirt streets of Bhopal's Sanjay Nagar slum. After days without a drop of water, the Malviya family were the first to reach the hole they had drilled in the pipe, filling what containers they had as quickly as they could. Within minutes, three of them were dead, hacked to death by angry neighbours who accused them of stealing water. |
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MILLIONS of pounds of taxpayers' money sent to India to educate poor children is falling into the pockets of crooked officials in the country. A News of the World investigation has uncovered corruption on an incredible scale after our Government poured in £340 million aid. It went to a multi-billion schools project blasted by Indian inspectors as fraudulent and riddled with malpractice. |
HUNDREDS of Christians in the Indian state of Orissa have been forced to renounce their religion and become Hindus after lynch mobs issued them with a stark ultimatum: convert or die. |
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THE birth of Rekha's second daughter should have been one of the happiest days of her life. Instead, she lay on the bed of her home on the outskirts of Delhi, the newborn child on the floor, screaming in terror as her mother-in-law poured paraffin over her. This was her punishment, the older woman said, preparing to strike a match: Rekha had failed again to deliver a son and it would be better for everyone if she were dead. Suddenly the door burst open and her neighbours rushed in, roused by the frantic screaming. They bundled Rekha and her daughter out of the house, never to return. |
AMID a narrow warren of side streets close to the mosque that dominates the skyline on the edge of the mega-slum of Dharavi, in the heart of Mumbai, a young boy tilts his head back and stares up at the narrow strip of blue which is all that can be seen of the sky. Rickety warehouses crowd in from all sides, their high sheet-metal walls and overhanging asbestos roofs blocking out the sun, plunging the dirt streets below into a gloomy half-light, though it is nearly midday. The National |
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A HERO Brit told last night how he plunged 50ft and broke his back trying to save his girlfriend from the Mumbai murder squad. As gunshots drew closer and flames licked around the corridor outside their third floor hotel room, Will Pike and Kelly Doyle prayed—and knotted sheets together to make a rope to escape out the window. |
The young mother was standing by the side of the road, clutching her baby. The baby was dead. Damilvany Gnanakumar watched as she tried to make a decision. Around them, thousands of people were picking their way between bodies strewn across the road, desperate to escape the fighting all around them. |
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Rounding the last defender, Raja Chinnaswamy looks up towards the iron frame of the goal in the lee of the white-washed wall of the orphanage behind. He pulls back his right foot and lets fly, sending the ball hurtling past the goalkeeper and out through the gaping hole in the torn netting.
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RAJESH was 14 when he disappeared. Beneath a mop of jet black hair, his clear brown eyes glance sideways out of the picture that is all his family have left of him. He was his parents’ only son and they doted and relied on him. One morning in April last year, his mother, Sunita, asked him to go out to fetch water. She remembers him loading the empty plastic containers on to his cart and setting off cheerfully down the lane. It was the last time she saw him. |
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By the time Arulmathy and her fellow Tamil Tigers realised they were surrounded, it was too late. They had fallen asleep and now Sri Lankan soldiers were swarming into their bunker. Arulmathy watched aghast as 75 women she had fought beside for so many months reached for their hand grenades, pulled the pins and blew themselves to pieces, as they had been ordered to do. |
Tamil children as young as 11 were forced at gunpoint to fight for the Tigers in Sri Lanka's civil war. Survivors talked of their ordeal to Gethin Chamberlain in Ambepusse. |
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SWAPAN Haldar had no inkling the tiger was there until it pounced, clamping its jaws around his head and dragging him backwards into the thick mangrove forest. It was the last time anyone saw him alive. “Don’t go,” his wife, Minati Haldar, had begged him. There seemed to be tigers everywhere and they were getting bolder and more aggressive. But Swapan would not be swayed. It was a Saturday morning in January when the crab fisherman set off. His companions returned with his body the following night. |
This is really a disaster. I don't know really how to explain it. At the moment, it is like hell...
"The most terrible thing that I have seen was when a mother had a bullet go through her breast and she was dead and the baby was still on the other side of the breast and the baby was drinking her milk, and that really affected me. I was at that place where it happened...I'm talking to you now, but maybe tomorrow I'll be dead." Vany Kumar, 25, speaking by telephone from a shelled hospital in Sri Lanka's no fire zone. |
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Sri Lankan guards 'sexually abused girls' in Tamil refugee camp A British medic held for months in an internment camp for Tamil civilians has revealed how military guards dealt out cruel punishments, while many suspected of links to Tiger rebels were taken away and have not been seen since.
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Had everything gone to plan, Fiona MacKeown should have been sitting in a courtroom in Panaji, Goa, on Friday afternoon, giving evidence for the prosecution in the case of the two men charged with killing her daughter, Scarlett Keeling. |
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THE three women were at a bus stop when the police rolled up. "You are begging, get in the van," the officers told them. They protested their innocence, but to no avail. After they were locked up in beggars' prison behind the high, barbed-wire-topped walls of the Nirmal Chhaya complex, next door to Delhi's Tihar jail, 50-year-old Ratnabai Kale twice tried to hang herself with her own sari. |
Goa: property frenzy and crime poison the hippy dream For decades, waves of westerners have swept through the beautiful Indian resort, some settling in search of the good life. But the trial of two men accused of killing a British teenager is just the latest source of tension in a community beset by fears over rising crime and economic insecurity. |
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The three children standing in the dirt outside the tent in Sri Lanka's newest internment camp have not seen their mother for weeks, ever since a shell exploded next to the bunker where they had taken cover, ripping a hole in her stomach.
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An air of deep melancholy descends as Dr Devender Mohanty recalls his final conversation with his son. Kunal Mohanty had been in Glasgow sitting his exams to qualify as a captain in the Indian merchant navy, but his father was keen for him to return home as soon as possible to tend to his pregnant wife. "I said, come home soon... I told him I'd get his ticket if he came sooner. He said no, he had already booked a return ticket..." The doctors voice trails off. Less than 24 hours after hanging up the receiver on their long- distance phone conversation, Kunal Mohanty was bleeding to death in a city street, his throat cut by a thug motivated by pure racism. |
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When Sania Mirza and Shoaib Malik – an Indian tennis star and Pakistan's cricket hero – fell in love, it offended Hindu sensibilities and bolstered Muslim pride.
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Portraits of the socialite and fashion designer for Grazia. |
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It may have given the world the Kama Sutra and the Bollywood wet sari scene, but it appears that India is not yet ready to be exposed to the delicate subject of sex on the internet.
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MARK Harvey was the first of the snipers to react, dropping to his knee and fixing the man carrying the RPG in his sights, one shot, a moving target, the man dropping like a stone, dead before he hit the ground. |
Caught in the middle of the Helmand river, the fleeing Taliban were paddling their boat back to shore for dear life. Smoke from the ambush they had just sprung on American special forces still hung in the air, but their attention was fixed on the two helicopter gunships that had appeared above them.
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"I want this moving now, now, now," he screamed, and there was another burst of gunfire overhead. Then they were there, the Warriors, with their 30mm cannon and chain guns, appearing over the crest of the bridge, just as the cavalry should. |
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CAROL Singwoma is weaving her way through the crowd, the eyes of the men on her dirty white knitted turtle-neck top and the little skirt covering her thin legs. |
STRUGGLING TO sit up, Frederic Couture surveyed his torn trouser leg and the bloodied strips of flesh which were all that remained of his foot. A landmine had exploded, blowing the rest of it away. "I'm 21-years-old and I've lost my foot,'' he cried. "What am I going to do now?' |
AHMED'S head is turned away to one side, his mouth open, the blood which streaks his face already dry. His right hand is by his side, the left curled across his stomach. The fingers stop a few inches from the inch-wide hole just above his groin. |
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TAM O'SHANTER on his head, pistol in his belt, the commanding officer of the Black Watch is striding ahead through the crowded market place in the centre of the town of Az Zubayr. |
ROMANIA counts the cost of closer ties to the West as thousands of children are left behind while their parents search for work. |
ONE man held her arms, others held her legs. They took it in turns to rape her. It lasted six hours. When the baby is born in four months time she will keep it. But a part of her will always think of it as her Janjaweed child. |
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THE grave is just a mound of earth, no more than two feet high at its peak and 10ft in diameter. It lies about 50 yards from the edge of the village of Nami in North Darfur. The nine bodies buried had lain on the ground for more than a week before the Janjaweed finally left the village and the people who had escaped the killing felt brave enough to return. |
THE men's toilet in Magennis's bar in central Belfast is not a large room. There is a small sink to the right of the door on the way in, a single stall to the rear of the room containing a WC, and a stainless steel trough on the same wall as the sink, with room for two people. There are a couple of adverts on the wall above the trough; below it is the obligatory puddle of urine on the floor. In the chipped brown varnish on the back of the door, the initials PIRA - standing for Provisional Irish Republican Army - have been scratched. |
Chancellor Gordon Brown will today end his long bachelor years and wed long -time girlfriend Sarah Macaulay. The man who has made prudence his by-word has finally decided to throw caution to the wind amid amazing secrecy. But he finally came clean last night after The Daily Record discovered the banns posted at his local registrar's office
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Robina ud Din was a picture of misery. When American soldiers opened fire on her family's car at a checkpoint in the eastern town of Khost, glass fragments ripped open her left eye. The US military said the vehicle failed to stop when told to do so. But her family - who had been returning from her father's funeral - said soldiers opened fire without warning. |
It was as astonishing an admission as any that has emerged from the lips of a British officer in the four and a half years since the tanks rolled over the Iraqi border. The British Army, said the man sitting in a prefab hut in Britain’s last base in the country, were tired of fighting. |
It was just after dawn yesterday morning when the Warrior crashed through the wall of the house tucked away down a side road in the Iraqi town of Al Zubayr. |
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RIBS SHOWING clearly through their tattered flanks, the starving horses corralled on the edge of the eastern Romanian city of Galati are just a few days away from death.
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EDVARD Munch's most famous painting, The Scream, is damaged beyond repair. Four years after it was stolen in an armed raid on an Oslo museum, and two years after Norwegian police found it, scratched and water-damaged, conservators have told The Sunday Telegraph there is nothing more they can do to restore what is undoubtedly one of the most recognisable paintings in the world.
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It could have been a scene from any beach in Turkey: a cluster of young women reclining on sun-loungers, soaking up the midday rays, thumbing through novels and smoking cigarettes, while fellow holidaymakers splashed in the sea.
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Copyright ©2009 Gethin Chamberlain. All rights reserved. |
Corruption
adds extra spice to the IPL's cocktail of Bollywood, rock and sport
