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This is where to come for my take on life and times in the world’s largest democracy
13:51 UK time, Monday, 13 May 2013
Is India's Congress government headed towards a meltdown? And has PM Manmohan Singh, the soft-spoken technocrat with a clean image, lost the "moral high ground", as a critic says?
For a government which has lurched from one crisis to another, developments over the weekend evoked a sense of deja vu.
13:33 UK time, Thursday, 2 May 2013
There has been outrage in India over the death of Sarabjit Singh, an Indian man convicted of spying by Pakistan, who was brutally attacked last week by fellow inmates.
A lot of the "anger" has been played out on TV news channels. Some of them described Singh, who died in a Lahore hospital, as a "martyr".
12:10 UK time, Friday, 19 April 2013
The story of India's economic surge is dominated by two conflicting narratives.
The sceptics insist that growth has been largely jobless and deepened inequality in an already hierarchical society.
13:42 UK time, Monday, 1 April 2013
"It is a landmark judgement," Sakhtivel Selvaraj, a leading Delhi-based health economist, tells me, hours after the Indian Supreme Court's decision to reject a plea by Swiss pharmaceutical firm Novartis to patent an updated version of its cancer drug, Glivec.
Monday's decision means generic drugmakers can continue to sell copies of the drug at a lower price in India, one of the fastest growing pharmaceutical markets in the world.
05:35 UK time, Friday, 22 March 2013
Italy's decision to send back to Delhi for trial two marines accused of murdering two Indian fishermen is being described by many in India as a triumph for its diplomacy.
Considering the knotty situation both the countries had got in over the issue - India's Supreme Court barring the Italian ambassador from leaving the country and insisting that he had effectively surrendered his diplomatic immunity with his affidavit promising the marines' return - Rome's decision certainly defuses an unsavoury diplomatic row.
17:11 UK time, Monday, 18 March 2013
Soutik added analysis to:
After visiting the popular tourist destination of Orchha in Madhya Pradesh the Swiss couple had cycled some 80km (50 miles) and stopped to camp for the night in a remote and isolated area near a dense forest in Datia district.
It is not a place frequented by tourists and is not a camping area, locals say.
00:57 UK time, Saturday, 16 March 2013
India's government has reportedly cleared lowering the age of consent for sex to 16 years.
This comes after increasing it to 18 in a tough anti-rape ordinance following the outrage after the fatal gang rape of a student in Delhi last December.
10:09 UK time, Monday, 11 March 2013
Delhi's Tihar prison promises "safe and secure custody" of inmates, according to its website.
But the death in prison of a man accused in the gang rape and murder of a student in Delhi has raised questions about security in what is South Asia's largest prison.
12:28 UK time, Wednesday, 6 March 2013
It is not the first time the heir apparent of India's powerful Nehru-Gandhi dynasty has spoken about his disinclination to become the prime minister in the event of his party winning the general elections.
"Asking me whether you want to be the prime minister is a wrong question," Rahul Gandhi of the ruling Congress party told MPs at an informal meeting on Tuesday. "The prime minister's post is not my priority. I believe in long-term politics."
13:48 UK time, Thursday, 28 February 2013
Does India need a bank for women?
India's government thinks so. Plans for such a bank - the first state-run one of its kind in India - were announced in the annual budget.
00:15 UK time, Tuesday, 26 February 2013
Indians working abroad continue to send more money home than their counterparts from other countries.
In 2012, India topped the list with $70bn (£47bn) of remittance inflows, followed by China ($66bn), the Philippines and Mexico ($24bn each), Nigeria ($21bn), according to the latest World Bank figures on migration and remittances.
01:04 UK time, Sunday, 17 February 2013
What do you make of householders turned austere pilgrims who live in tatty canvas tents on a flood plain of a river braving regular baths in freezing water, biting cold, smoky skies and ear-splitting din for more than a month?
Most of them come from villages, are elderly, and belong to the higher castes. Many are worldly people turned ascetics eking out spartan lives as kalpavasis (those who spend their days in silent prayer) at the ongoing Kumbh Mela, the biggest religious gathering in the world.
02:40 UK time, Thursday, 31 January 2013
Is India facing what author Salman Rushdie calls a "cultural emergency" with writers, painters and filmmakers being targeted by the mob? (The Emergency in the 1970s was the darkest hour in Independent India's history when civil liberties were suspended.)
Consider the events that have made the front pages this week.
01:31 UK time, Friday, 25 January 2013
A panel reviewing India's laws on sex crimes after the fatal gang rape of a student has highlighted the problem of criminalisation of politics and asked lawmakers facing severe charges to voluntarily quit as a mark of respect to the parliament and the constitution.
Last year, India's most respected election watchdog Association for Democratic Reforms informed us that nearly a third of MPs - 158 of 543 - in the parliament faced criminal charges.
00:24 UK time, Wednesday, 23 January 2013
Soutik added analysis to:
Suicide has become the second leading cause of death among the country's young adults, after road accidents in men, and childbirth-related complications in women.
Suicide in India - July 2012
15:28 UK time, Monday, 21 January 2013
The promotion of Rahul Gandhi and his speech at a conclave of the Congress party at the weekend has surely boosted the party's flagging morale.
For a shy and reticent politician who's rarely heard in the parliament and has never given a proper media interview, Mr Gandhi delivered an unusually candid and heartfelt speech to mark his anointment as the number two in the party.
18:25 UK time, Wednesday, 9 January 2013
A significant consequence of the horrific rape and death of a 23-year-old student in Delhi has been the decision to set up six "fast track" courts in the capital to deal specifically with cases relating to sexual assaults of women.
Fast track courts are not new in India - have they worked?
11:41 UK time, Saturday, 29 December 2012
People have called her Braveheart, Fearless and India's Daughter, among other things, and sent up a billion prayers for a speedy recovery.
When the unidentified woman died in a Singapore hospital early on Saturday, the victim of a savage rape on a moving bus in the capital, Delhi, it was time again, many said, to ask: why does India treat its women so badly?
08:01 UK time, Monday, 24 December 2012
Have India's rulers become disengaged from the people?
As violent protests erupted in the capital, Delhi, at the weekend over the horrific gang rape of a 23-year-old student, many Indians were asking this question.
11:26 UK time, Tuesday, 18 December 2012
A 23-year-old woman is savagely attacked and raped by a group of men inside a moving bus and her male friend is beaten up senselessly. Battered and bleeding profusely, they are dumped near an expressway in Delhi, where they are found by a passer-by.
Another day, another rape, another round of outrage. Yet, more than 630 rapes later this year so far, nothing much will really change.
Before joining the BBC, Soutik worked with Indian newspapers and magazines and an international newspaper as a correspondent and an editor.
He was a Reuters Fellow at the University of Oxford.
Soutik has covered elections in Afghanistan and Sri Lanka, the tsunami in India and Sri Lanka in 2005, and militancy in Kashmir, working mostly on a series of stories on the state of youth and women in the disputed region.
In 2005, he used a laptop link to connect BBC News readers from around the world to a people living in a Pashtun village in Afghanistan. He revisited the village two years later to do a similar project and to see how life had changed.
He loves blues and jazz, and believes Derek Trucks is the best and most innovative slide guitarist alive.
He is a big movie buff, with Michael Haneke, Martin Scorsese, the Coen Brothers, Woody Allen and Satyajit Ray among his favourite directors.
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