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At his zenith, Amit Bhardwaj amassed wealth equivalent to the GDP of a small nation duping thousands of investors lured in by the promise of quick riches mining cryptocurrencies. Today, he is treated like a common criminal – being made to sit on the floor and given minimum comforts – under arrest by the Pune […]

In December 22, just before the long Christmas weekend last year, a 25-year-old man from Wandoor, one of several small towns strewn across Malappuram in north Kerala, was arrested by the state police. Kodakkadan Sharaf Ali was in possession of child pornography, a crime that could lead to five years of imprisonment. People have been […]

“Hands off the computer!” The words, spoken in chaste Bundeli, still ring in Meera’s ears. Computers were things Meera had first heard about in 2005 while she was still in college, graduating in social sciences. They helped you work faster, she knew that. You could write, no, type, endless reams of text on them. You […]

“Hello, Azim seth… namaskar seth-ji,” says 80-year old Jijabrao Gulabrao Deshmukh looking into the camera. “Azim seth-ji baat kar rahen hain?” “Hello, hello?” “Premji is not on the line, we’re only recording your message, we are doing an interview for a story,” I tell him, feeling a little bad for him. His face falls, his […]

Mein cyber hoon (I am a cyber),” says Mandal, who looks a teenager but insists he’s 21 years old. In these parts – Karmatand and elsewhere in the villages of Jamtara, Madhupur, and Dumka of eastern Jharkhand – the frequently-used “cyber” in Hindi and Bengali refers to cybercrime and those dabbling in cybercrime, both petty and […]

A young girl, not more than 12 years old is dressed in a bright pink lehenga and a royal blue velvet blouse. She is standing in the middle of a field and swaying her body, shaking her hips, her chest heaving as she dances to a popular Hariyanvi number that goes Meri jalti jawani maange paani paani. It’s a 15-second clip on […]

This story starts with Udhay Shankar N, who walked into my office on Church Street one day in 2012 and said we were going out to lunch. “We are?” I asked. “Yes.” he said. “You are going to join Silk.” I wasn’t unfamiliar with Silk-List at that point. In fact, I was already a member […]

Chapter 1 How tiger skin in Nepal was traced to Uttar Pradesh On the last day of March 2017, Shikha Bisht walked from her home on the idyllic campus of the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) in Dehradun to her office. The five-minute walk in the early summer felt pleasant amidst the pyramid-like buildings that […]

Chetan Gowda, 27, was speaking to a room full of students in IIIT Hyderabad for a workshop on OpenStreetMap for beginners organised by Swecha, a non-profit organisation to support free software movement last month. There were close to 40 students in the room. Beginners often ask him: Why use open source maps when there are […]

The 300 million Indians older than 60 years by 2050 will owe it big time to a team of scientists, psychiatrists, and local health professionals in Kolar today. It is prospecting for gold of a different kind: data on how Indians grow old. It’s a dry and nippy Monday morning in Dalasanur, a village in […]

Commonly called “revenge porn”, “leak” or “MMS scandal”, image-based abuse is a widespread and systemic yet untrammelled issue that destroys lives. This article is the first in a series on image-based abuse in India. Content warning: This article discusses sensitive topics, including rape, sexual assault, sexual abuse, image-based abuse, and suicide. The content may be […]

Many legends abound about the monsoon in India — but none so delightful as that around the Jacobin pied cuckoo. A slender black and white cuckoo, the bird is easily identifiable with its long tail and distinctive crest. Even in flight, one can easily spot the bird by the white patches on its wings and […]

A girl wakes up in a tiny dark cell. Where am I? What is this place? Why can’t I remember how I came here? She knocks on the door. “Is anybody there?” She paces up and down the room. An older woman enters. Everybody calls her Masi; she runs a brothel. A young girl, Meena, […]

“Shut the f**k up”“Feminism sucks” As Vaishali Thakker, a 23-year old open source programmer looked over the hall filled with around 200 people, she didn’t know how to react to what she had just heard. Thakker was one of the five women on the stage at PyCon India 2017, a conference on the use of […]

As online harassment explodes in India, the world’s second largest market of internet users, local police and judiciary struggle with the new-age crime — even if it ends in a suicide Linkan Subudhi was on cloud nine on the morning of May 29, before her political career nosedived. It was the day after the state […]

Story highlights: Anand Prakash just turned 24, and he is already way richer than most people in his cohort. One of India’s highest-paid bug bounty hunters and a gig economy hero, Prakash’s life revolves around getting payouts from tech companies for responsibly disclosing exploits and vulnerabilities on their websites and/or software products. A self-professed former […]

Innovator, education reformist and outlier Sonam Wangchuk is trying to turn the highest cold desert in the world — Ladakh — into a greenland. FactorDaily travelled to Pheyang village in Leh where Wangchuk is making artificial glaciers or ‘Ice Stupas‘. Watch this video to find out how he’s doing this. Listen in: Outliers 21: Sonam Wangchuk wishes people […]

If you have not keenly followed the history of the Indian tech industry, you will not have heard of Atul Chitnis. Go ahead, Google him up. He is described as “an Indian consulting technologist” on Wikipedia. That’s like saying Steve Jobs worked at the intersection of technology and humans. Or, Richard Stallman is a free software evangelist. Or, Satish […]

Between 2014 and 2016, 76 people died clicking selfies in India — more than half the total number of such deaths reported worldwide during the same period. In 2017, at least 11 lives have been lost in selfie-related accidents in India. What explains this disturbing trend? On a bright June evening in 2014, as the […]

How he used lessons from his troubled childhood and early entrepreneurial failures to build Freshdesk, one of India’s fastest growing product startups. Can he make all this count? “Girish is like Shrek,” says Shoba Girish. “If you’re Prince Charming, everybody likes you upfront, but if you look like an ordinary man, especially like Shrek, nobody […]

It’s the company’s sixth anniversary party, and HasGeek House is thrumming with activity, though it’s nowhere near as busy as it’s going to get in a couple of hours. People walk in and out of the small independent house in Bengaluru’s Domlur area that serves as headquarters for HasGeek. On the top floor of the […]

Six days before he died of pancreatic cancer, Arvindkumar Alagarswamy knew his time was coming. “I fear I am going to die,” he told Lakshmi, his wife of 13 years. It was nearly midnight on April 13 and Lakshmi pleaded Arvind not to give up. Arvind, 36, just laid back, his frail frame sinking deeper […]

Agents of ishq tell stories about love, sex, and desire in their own voices The young man speaks with a slight lisp. His voice is gentle, dripping with laughter. “Mera naam AK hai, main ikkis saal ka hoon, aur yeh mere isi rainy season ki kahani hai… Chhoti si, happy kahani,” he says. I am […]

Abid to save a 35-year-old fertiliser plant has turned a small port town 590km south of Chennai into the testbed for a breakthrough carbon dioxide (CO2) separation technology. Tuticorin Alkali Chemicals and Fertilisers Ltd (TFL) in Thoothukudi was looking at closure after its CO2 (a raw material for the plant) supply was cut off. Carbon Clean […]

Zakhil Suresh, an aspiring chartered accountant in Kodungallur, a small port town on the Malabar coast in Kerala, has a nose for investment opportunities. Suresh, 23, was an early entrant into the swirling world of Bitcoins, a so-called cryptocurrency that is taking the world by storm — it has appreciated about 33 million times since […]

In 2015, Pratham Books, a not-for-profit publisher of children’s literature, created an online platform called Storyweaver. The publishing house threw open its entire repository of stories and images, and a set of tools using which students, parents, teachers and educators can read, download, translate and repurpose books. This being an open-source project, they can do all this […]

It is well past midnight and Parveen Singhal roars on a black Royal Enfield 500cc Thunderbird through the streets of Indore. His friends and relatives try to keep pace with him on their motorbikes and a car but it is Singhal, 21, who pulls first into their destination: Sarafa, a food street by night that is […]