Lydia Polgreen The New York Times

On his barefoot trudge to school decades ago, a young Ashok Khade passed inescapable reminders of what he was: the well from which he was not allowed to drink; the temple where he was not permitted to worship. At school, he took his place on the floor in a part of the classroom built a step lower than the rest.

All summer, Homindon Singh Lisam's phone rang off the hook. As a doctor and hospital administrator in Manipur state, he is no stranger to triage. But this was different. The blockade greatly reduced access to crucial medical supplies at a government hospital in Imphal.

The first doctor to die, a senior government health administrator, was shot on his morning walk last October by two men on a motorbike. Six months later, his successor, a cardiologist, was shot to death while out on a predawn stroll. A third government doctor, accused of conspiring to murder the first two, was found dead in jail in June, lying in a...

Ankaji Bhai Gangar, a 49-year-old subsistence farmer, stood in line in this remote village until, for the first time in his life, he squinted into the soft glow of a computer screen.

The village bureaucrat shifted from foot to foot, hands clasped behind his back, beads of sweat forming on his balding head. The eyes of hundreds of wiry village laborers, clad in dusty <i>lungis</i>, were fixed upon him.A group of auditors, themselves villagers, read their findings. A signature had been forged for the delivery of soil ...

Mahitosh Sarkar came here from his distant village in West Bengal 12 years ago looking for a better life, and he found it. He abandoned the penniless existence of a subsistence fisherman to become a big-city vegetable seller. His wife found work as a maid. Their four children went to school. Their tiny household, a grim but weather-tight room in a ...

He was a small-town lawyer from a regional political party in a southern Indian state. By almost any measure, Andimuthu Raja, who had no background in telecommunications or in business, seemed an unlikely candidate to be the government minister presiding over the fastest-growing cellphone market in the world. But he had the only qualification that ...

Beyond the surface issues, lies a deeper tension, in which India sees a warmer relationship between Washington and Beijing under the Obama administration as a threat to its own rise as a global power.

Kerala, a relatively prosperous and well-governed state in southern India, is in the grips of an acute shortage of coconut pluckers that threatens to undermine one of its most important industries.

On his barefoot trudge to school decades ago, a young Ashok Khade passed inescapable reminders of what he was: the well from which he was not allowed to drink; the temple where he was not permitted to worship. At school, he took his place on the floor in a part of the classroom built a step lower than the rest.

All summer, Homindon Singh Lisam's phone rang off the hook. As a doctor and hospital administrator in Manipur state, he is no stranger to triage. But this was different. The blockade greatly reduced access to crucial medical supplies at a government hospital in Imphal.

The first doctor to die, a senior government health administrator, was shot on his morning walk last October by two men on a motorbike. Six months later, his successor, a cardiologist, was shot to death while out on a predawn stroll. A third government doctor, accused of conspiring to murder the first two, was found dead in jail in June, lying in a...

Ankaji Bhai Gangar, a 49-year-old subsistence farmer, stood in line in this remote village until, for the first time in his life, he squinted into the soft glow of a computer screen.

The village bureaucrat shifted from foot to foot, hands clasped behind his back, beads of sweat forming on his balding head. The eyes of hundreds of wiry village laborers, clad in dusty <i>lungis</i>, were fixed upon him.A group of auditors, themselves villagers, read their findings. A signature had been forged for the delivery of soil ...

Mahitosh Sarkar came here from his distant village in West Bengal 12 years ago looking for a better life, and he found it. He abandoned the penniless existence of a subsistence fisherman to become a big-city vegetable seller. His wife found work as a maid. Their four children went to school. Their tiny household, a grim but weather-tight room in a ...

He was a small-town lawyer from a regional political party in a southern Indian state. By almost any measure, Andimuthu Raja, who had no background in telecommunications or in business, seemed an unlikely candidate to be the government minister presiding over the fastest-growing cellphone market in the world. But he had the only qualification that ...

Beyond the surface issues, lies a deeper tension, in which India sees a warmer relationship between Washington and Beijing under the Obama administration as a threat to its own rise as a global power.

Kerala, a relatively prosperous and well-governed state in southern India, is in the grips of an acute shortage of coconut pluckers that threatens to undermine one of its most important industries.