Sushmita Pathak

The 17-year-old wanted to bring her father home to his village after he was injured in the city where he worked. She was praised as a national hero and given honors and prizes. How is she doing now?

There's long been opposition to the practice of forcing a woman on her period to menstrual exile in a hut, which can be unsafe and unsanitary. One charity has a new interim response: upgrade the huts.

Before multiplex cinemas, India had tens of thousands of single-screen movie houses. But the way Indians watch movies has changed, and the pandemic forced many old cinemas to shut their doors forever.

Bangladeshi soldiers are enforcing a seven-day lockdown. As the West opens up, poorer countries with low vaccination rates are being hit by wave after wave of COVID-19.

Hospitals are full. Testing is scant. Illiteracy is high. Most deaths are never registered. COVID-19's wrath in rural India is difficult to measure but public health experts are worried.

Hospitals don't have enough oxygen for patients on ventilators. There are delivery bottlenecks. Families are sometimes told to get their own supplies. Health experts say it didn't have to be this way.

Scientists, funeral directors and survivors say the real numbers of infections and deaths in India may be many times more than the reported figures.

Thursday's tally was India's highest since the pandemic began – more than double the previous 2020 peak.

Hindu pilgrims are traveling to bathe in the Ganges River to wipe out their sins.

They're majestic. They're neglected. And now they're slowly being fixed up. Conservationists are preserving them — and officials hope the fountains will supply free water for the city's impoverished.