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India |
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Indian workers are paid just 25p an hour and forced to work overtime in factories used by some of Britain's best-known high street stores Some of the biggest names on the British high street are at the centre of a major sweatshop scandal. An Observer investigation has found staff at their Indian suppliers working up to 16 hours a day. Marks & Spencer, Gap and Next have all launched their own inquiries into the abuses and pledged to end the practice of excessive overtime, which is in flagrant breach of the industry's ethical trading initiative (ETI) and Indian labour law. Some workers say they were paid at half the legal overtime rate. Gap, which uses the same factory as Next, confirmed it had found wage violations and gave its supplier a deadline of midnight last night to repay workers who lost out. M&S says it has yet to see evidence to support the wage claims. |
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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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In Pictures |
Tiger attack |
Foeticide |
Slumdogs |
Religious cleansing |
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Selection |
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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. |
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. |
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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 |
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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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. |
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. |
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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. |
“THE TIGERS are in there,” the man at the tiller says, pointing into the mangroves that overhang the deck of the boat as it noses along the edge of the inlet. The dappled sunlight plays on pale green and yellow leaves, reflecting off the water, casting shadows among the branches, breaking up the shape of anything moving among the trees. Somewhere out of sight, 500lb of heavily muscled tiger is picking its way through the forest, looking for dinner. “In there,” the boatman says again, pointing urgently, but fear makes every shadow look like a stripe. |
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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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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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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 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. |
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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. |
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. |
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THE pregnancy came all too easily. Monica was 13, and the man in question was her overseer at the brick kiln where she worked about 40km north of the booming Indian mega-city of Kolkata. More than twice her age and married with two children of his own, he was the son of the kiln owner. He had smiled at her as she trotted past him every day, carrying on her head the rough clay bricks shaped from river mud which she would deposit in the kiln to be baked into the building blocks of Kolkata’s expansion. |
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. |
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SHE is a member of that most famous of Indian families, the Gandhis, but Priyanka Gandhi Vadra stands accused of the most un-Indian of fashion crimes - ditching the sari in favour of western clothes. |
Mumbai terror attacks: Nightmare in the lap of luxury THE terrorist rampage that gripped the world for three days began in silence as eight killers stepped from a boat on to a dark city beach. Now India demands to know who they were, where they came from ... and most of all, why the security forces failed to prevent them |
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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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Delhi sweeps streets of beggars as India prepares for Commonwealth Games 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. As India's capital stumbles towards the starting line for next year's Commonwealth Games, draconian orders have gone out to clear the streets of beggars. |
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HER supporters hand-feed her cake, she covers herself in diamonds and has a fleet of planes. Yet, as a Dalit, an 'untouchable', she is loved by India's legions of poor and could even be prime minister after the general election |
THOUSANDS of terrified Indian Christians are hiding in the forests of the volatile Indian state of Orissa after a wave of religious ‘cleansing’ forced them from their burnt-out homes with no immediate prospect of return. |
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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. |
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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They may be revered by India's Hindus, but the thousands of cows that roam the streets of Delhi have now been targeted by exasperated judges, who have condemned the city council for allowing the city's bovine population to spiral out of control. |
We are sitting on wicker chairs in a small, open-sided structure at the edge of an immaculate lawn as dusk falls. What appears to be a one-legged bird is hopping clumsily across the grass, pecking industriously at the grass. Away to the east, the elephants that plough up and down the shore of the lake that surrounds the Jai Mahal palace are nearing the end of their working day. |
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THE heartbroken fiancé of Slumdog Millionaire beauty Freida Pinto today reveals how the film’s success and her “infatuation” with co-star Dev Patel finished their relationship. Dumped Rohan Antao blames the hit movie and her on-screen lover for wrecking his wedding plans. |
They are the same small children wearing the same smart outfits they donned for the Oscars just last Sunday. But just one week later, little Slumdog stars Azharuddin Ismail and Rubina Ali are a world away from the Hollywood glitz—back in the filth of the shanty town they know as home. |
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FOR one summer, they terrorised the citizens of one of the world’s largest cities, modern-day highwaymen who shot first and never bothered with questions. There have been other biker gangs, maybe more famous biker gangs, but in India the one run by Om Prakash has become the stuff of urban legend. |
As Danny Boyle strode up to the stage at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Hollywood to collect the fourth Golden Globe of the night for Slumdog Millionaire, Sagar Kamaliya had already been up and about for hours. Half a day and 8,710 miles away in Los Angeles’s twin city of Mumbai, the sun was already high over the tin and asbestos rooftops of the tightly packed mass of houses and workshops that make up Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum and the setting for the Oscar front-runner. |
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The early onset of the Indian monsoon was meant to be good news for the country's farmers and the beleagured international food markets. Instead, dozens have died as floods swept the north west of the country and the newly planted rice seedlings are rotting off beneath the rain-lashed waters of the paddy fields. |
TUCKED away in a converted warehouse at the end of a narrow lane in an old mill compound in midtown Mumbai, the Blue Frog club would seem an unlikely venue for the start of a musical revolution.
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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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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. plus Whole new ball game The National |
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IN a country where public discussion of sex remains taboo, but where a wet sari scene is regarded as an essential part of a Bollywood movie, the job of the censor was never going to be an easy one. |
Airport authorities built new runway near religious site where 16 metre-high statue is under construction
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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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Copyright ©2009 Gethin Chamberlain. All rights reserved. |
