India | featured news

If you’ve never read anything by Anita Desai, you’re out of excuses. One of India’s most celebrated writers, she’s been publishing for almost 50 years and come close to winning the Booker Prize three times. (Ironically, her daughter, Kiran Desai, beat her to it in 2006 for “The Inheritance of Loss.”) Now she’s released “The Artist of Disappearance,” a collection of three superb novellas that’s a rare gift in the sparse December publishing season. Here, in miniature, you can experience the deceptively subtle, slightly surreal and profoundly insightful fiction of a world-class writer.

Many companies have moved their customer service lines to Manila to take advantage of workers who speak lightly accented English and are familiar with American culture.

At least 30 people, many of them women and children, are feared dead after a foot bridge spanning a river in north-eastern India collapses.

The Indian government thinks the $35 Aakash Android tablet has the power to change the world. After testing one out, we’d tend to agree. An Aakash tablet was brought to the VentureBeat office on Tuesday by Vivek Wadhwa, a Washington Post columnist and visiting professor at the University of California at Berkley and Duke. Wadhwa, who is researching the Indian education system, was given the tablet by Kapil Sibal, the Indian minister of human resources and development, who has been the driving force behind the tablet project. The device (whose name means “Sky” in Hindi) was produced entirely in India — a point of pride for the Indian government.

A poor government clerk from a desolate region of eastern India has become the first person ever to win $1 million on an Indian game show.

The world's 7 billionth person will be born into a population more aware than ever of the challenges of sustaining life on a crowded planet but no closer to a consensus about what to do about it.

More than 200 Indian girls whose names mean "unwanted" in Hindi are given a fresh start in a renaming ceremony... Statistics show a continuing preference for boys in India. The gender imbalance has widened every decade since independence in 1947.

Blackberry, which has been plagued by service outages in Europe, the Middle East and India this week, reports that disruptions have spread to Latin America.

Churches in the southern Indian state of Kerala are offering cash incentives to couples who produce more children, parish officials say, amid concerns about the declining number of Christians.

India introduced a cheap tablet computer Wednesday, saying it would deliver modern technology to the countryside to help lift villagers out of poverty....