カテゴリー: Global development
The gill plates of the extremely intelligent fish – many species of which are already categorised as endangered – are sold across east Asia as remedies said to have ‘no basis in medical science’Every morning, starting at 3am, Lakshan hacks up manta ray…
Even stories on cost of living leave journalists facing assault, threats and arrest under Digital Security ActFour weeks ago, a reporter in Bangladesh was hauled from his office, badly beaten – and then thrown from the roof of his building, leaving him…
Despite the pain of the condition, diagnoses take seven years on average globally. In India, where 42 million women have the disease, cultural stigmas can make the delay even longer‘Hell-on-earth excruciating pain,” is how Ruhi Singh* describes her exp…
A decade after Bangladesh’s worst garment-industry disaster, injury and ill health plagues those that escapedThe cracks on the walls started to appear two days earlier. But despite the warning signs, Moushumi Begum still came to work on 24 April 2013. …
The formidable Indian environmentalist discusses her 50-year struggle to protect seeds and farmers from the ‘poison cartel’ of corporate agricultureYou don’t have to look very far to find the essence of life, says Vandana Shiva. But in a society caught…
In wake of children’s cough syrup scandal, an expert says regulatory system is ‘grossly understaffed and underfunctional’About 3% of drugs routinely taken by Indians for ailments such as hypertension, bacterial infections and allergies are “substandard…
Exporting churpi, herders’ smoked yak cheese, has transformed lives in remote Himalayan villagesOn a cold, wet August morning in the windswept high pastures of the Nepalese Himalayas, a stream of herders bring fresh milk to a makeshift tent at an altit…
As his country overtakes China as the world’s most populous, Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government is escalating its attack on civil rightsIndia has many things going for it these days but the growing authoritarianism of prime minister Narendra …
Officials say it will leave in May if Taliban cannot be persuaded to let local women work for organisationThe UN is ready to take the “heartbreaking” decision to pull out of Afghanistan in May if it cannot persuade the Taliban to let local women work f…
A group of Bangladesh’s health workers are working to reach women in some of the country’s most isolated places, to fight back against stigma of cervical cancer The health workers arrive on a wooden cart, hijabs blowing in the wind, as they are pulled …
The government has a ‘masterplan’ for the coastal province of Preah Sihanouk, with tourist meccas built on land given to elite families while the poor and powerless face the bulldozersPhotographs by Cindy Liu for The GuardianSitting on the veranda of a…
Despite the WHO declaring it eliminated in 1998, thousands of tea pickers have caught the diseaseAloka Gonju didn’t take much notice of the discoloured patch of skin on her left hand until her fingers began to stiffen and hurt. It became a struggle to …
Almost 12% of Nepali migrant workers who die abroad, mainly in the Gulf and Malaysia, take their own livesWhen Pawan Kumari’s husband called one morning from Kuwait, where he had gone to work nine months earlier, there was no reason to worry. They woul…
Visitors to Asia’s largest tulip garden in Srinagar, Kashmir, do not see the toil by low-paid workers that lies behind the spectacleAn explosion of colour – and long queues of traffic – marked the opening of Asia’s largest tulip garden in Srinagar, Kas…
In 1971, the Pakistan army began a brutal crackdown against Bengalis in which hundreds of thousands of women were detained and repeatedly brutalised. Only now are their stories beginning to be told• Warning: graphic information in this report may upse…