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, […]

A gripping narrative of Farzana, a sex trafficking survivor, who was lured by false promises of love and opportunity-- her journey unveils the disturbing nexus between technology and exploitation, shedding light on the hidden horrors of modern-day slavery.

“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 […]

Fighting superstition and irrationality with science, one death threat at a time Half an hour into Prashant Potdar’s exposition of godmen and miracles, a commotion breaks out among the audience seated at the back. Someone shouts loudly: “Chamatkaari Baba Ki Jai! (Praise to the miraculous Baba)”. The entire audience, numbering in hundreds and neatly segregated […]

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 […]