New Western sanctions seek to prevent other countries from importing Iran's crude oil. India has agreed to pay the price of crude oil it imports from Iran in gold, which makes it the first country to drop the US dollar for purchasing the Iranian oil. According to a report published by DEBKAfile news website, unnamed sources have stressed that China is also expected to follow suit. India and China... 

India's Ambassador to the UN Hardeep Singh Puri The permanent representatives of China and India to the United Nations say the US-led sanctions on Iranian oil sector are neither logical nor economically viable. Chinese Ambassador to the UN, Li Baodong said that US officials should reconsider their move on sanctioning Iran’s oil sector since these requests are irrational and contrary to other... 

A day after Australia’s ruling Labor reversed its policy of not selling uranium to India, China on Monday gave a guarded response to the move, saying all countries are entitled to peaceful use of nuclear energy. “China always believes countries are entitled to peaceful use of nuclear energy and at the same time they should fulfill the international obligations of nuclear non-proliferation,”... 

India has planned to recruit and deployed another 100,000 troops along the disputed borders with China and the Chinese southwestern Tibet. The troop increase will come over the next five years, as part of a $13 billion modernisation programme that will mark the largest expansion of the Indian army throughout the sub-continental country’s 60-year history, a Chinese scholar has reported in state media. Earlier... 

The UN has warned world population could reach 15 billion by 2100, adding pressure to crowded cities such as New Delhi. Nearly 7 billion people now inhabit planet but projections that number will double this century have shocked academics. The United Nations will warn this week that the world’s population could more than double to 15 billion by the end of this century, putting a catastrophic... 

A child of a salt pan worker plays on the parched dry bed in the Khadaghoda Sector in the Little Rann of Kutch. Devastated by one of the worst droughts in decades, farming does not get much tougher than in India where thousands left with poor harvests and big debts have been driven to take their own lives. ­Sadly, the government has turned a blind eye to the growing problem. The farmlands in Telangana... 

A gene that makes bugs highly resistant to almost all known antibiotics has been found in bacteria in water supplies in New Delhi used by local people for drinking, washing and cooking, scientists said on Thursday. The NDM 1 gene, which creates what some experts describe as “super superbugs”, has spread to germs that cause cholera and dysentery, and is circulating freely in other bacteria... 

Activists from India's main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) women's wing shout slogans against the Congress-led government during a protest against an increase in milk, vegetables and food prices in New Delhi on April 1, 2010. The BJP activists protested against the price hikes of essential commodities. Food inflation is still at 17 percent according to official figures. Strained by... 

India and Russia have decided to work together in the field of nuclear commerce. The two countries will help set up smaller nuclear power plants in South Asian countries such as Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, sources said. This, according to South Block sources, is a key outcome of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s visit to India. China is active in most South Asian countries, building infrastructure... 

A Kolkata slum dweller talks on a mobile in India, where the phones have become more affordable. Council of elders feared women would use phones to arrange forbidden marriages. An Indian village has banned unmarried women from using mobile phones for fear they will arrange forbidden marriages that are often punished by death, a local official said today. The Lank village council decided unmarried boys... 

High fertility rates risk turning India’s demographic dividend into a demographic disaster, reports Shreyasi Singh from New Delhi. Asha says she didn’t even tell her husband that she was going to get sterilised. The 29-year-old domestic worker from the busy New Delhi suburb of Noida says she knew her husband and family would disapprove of her having the procedure. But she says that with the couple... 

Australian experts say 3 locally discovered "superbug" cases might be just the "tip of the iceberg" Indian doctors warned earlier this year about the threat from a new multi-drug resistant “superbug” — months before a British study that New Delhi has condemned for scaremongering. A team of researchers from a leading private hospital in Mumbai came to similar conclusions... 

An Indian woman gave birth to a baby in the lavatory of an international passenger plane and tried to dispose of it down the toilet, media reports in New Delhi said on Thursday. The infant was found stuck in the toilet after the plane landed in Amritsar, northern India, and was rushed to hospital still attached to the toilet bowl, police and doctors told the Press Trust of India news agency. HP... 

Indian man manually cleaning sewers of you know what… and yet they have the capacity to build nuclear weapons and become software engineers and work in the West…? Until May 2007, Meera Devi rose before dawn each day and walked a half mile to a vegetable patch outside the village of Kachpura to find a secluded place. Dodging leering men and stick-wielding farmers and avoiding spots that... 

Does your Pepsi lack pep? Is your Coke not the real thing? India’s Hindu nationalist movement apparently has the answer: a new soft drink made from cow urine. The bovine brew is in the final stages of development by the Cow Protection Department of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), India’s biggest and oldest Hindu nationalist group, according to the man who makes it. Om Prakash, the...