Our weekly newsletter brings you our top stories, gender news from the world, and our team’s reading recommendations.

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It was a raid on a gay bar, Stonewall Inn, in New York City’s Greenwich village in June 1969 that led to street protests that lasted a week. The campaign that came to be known as the Stonewall Uprising was one of the most significant junctures of the LGBTQ movement in the US. But it also turned June into a month of universal celebration for the community and the history of its resistance against repression – what we now call the Pride Month. Sadly enough this last June did not offer much cause for joy for the movement. In the US itself where gender rights appear to be steadily regressing, this week the Supreme Court upheld state laws banning transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports. And in India, the community is still reeling under the blow dealt by the amendment to the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act 2019, that systematically erases several communities by questioning the right to self identification.

This week we published a deeply investigated report on why the amendment has strangled the support networks critical to transmasculine people.

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Tan is a non-binary transmasculine person from Varanasi. He says he is deeply caring about the questions, fears and uncertainties of his community. He has chosen to refuse gender affirmative care as a political statement – to demonstrate to society how to treat trans people regardless of what their bodies look like. But he is also clear-eyed about his advantages – caste, class, education, family. “These are privileges that the rest of my community does not have access to,” he points out.

Tan is a part of the kind of safety nets that the trans community has had to construct for itself in the absence of any institutional framework. These nets of support and care, especially those involving healthcare professionals who deliver gender affirming care, have been endangered by the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act, 2026. It has triggered deep anxiety across India’s trans community for effectively erasing the legal identities of trans men, trans women and genderqueer people from Indian law.

On the one hand, the law has now made medical certification the only legible path to legal recognition by erasing the right to self identify for many trans groups other than those historically recognised in India. But the same law also criminalises “inducing” a transgender identity, as we said earlier. The law is thus demanding proof that it is also harder to obtain.

“Gender affirming care was already inaccessible. The amount of violence you were experiencing was already horrifying. Now that the State doesn’t recognise us as constitutional beings, we can’t even imagine how these scenarios will worsen,” says Tan.

Transmasculine people are particularly vulnerable because they carry the gendered violence and surveillance that comes with being assigned female at birth. Secondly, there is little institutional framework, peer support or community based-care for them while the transfeminine and hijra communities have a longer, if inadequate, history within Indian healthcare. Even research is focussed almost exclusively on trans women and hijra communities.

What does this mean for the transmasculine community, caught between the State’s diktats, dysphoria and the medical community’s new anxieties around offering gender affirming care? Saranya Chakrapani brings together a moving and complex story that holds some answers.

Read our story here.

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Instagram Child Abuse: Meta is under fire for the second time in a week after a BBC investigation revealed Instagram was running paid ads that promoted child sexual abuse videos. India, the report says, has received nearly 1.9 million reports of suspected child sexual abuse material in 2025, making it one of the highest-reporting countries globally. The platform initially failed to act on complaints (“the ads do not go against our community standards”) but has since suspended flagged accounts. The Ministry of Information and Electronics Technology has also summoned Meta to seek an explanation.

Transgender Athlete Ban: States in the US can ban transgender women from competing in female school and college sports, the US Supreme Court has ruled. The court was ruling on cases challenging bans on participation in two states, Idaho and West Virginia. Over two dozen states have enacted bans since Idaho did in 2020. The argument behind the ban is that permitting transgender women in women’s sports gives the former a physical advantage in competition. Civil rights groups have argued that the verdict could encourage more transphobic policies.

Wage Hike: The Viksit Bharat-Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) (VB-GRAM G) Act, 2025 came into effect this week with a new fixed floor wage of Rs 300 per day across all states. The Act will also increase the number of guaranteed workdays from 100 to 125. However, as economists, activists and labour rights experts have argued in BehanBox, it was enacted without meaningful consultation with workers, women’s collectives, or state governments, and ends up dismantling a rights-based framework that had become a lifeline for millions of rural women farmers and workers.

Erin vs Data Centres: Environmental activist Erin Brockovich is now campaigning against the expansion of AI facilities across the US. The activist, whose work became known worldwide after her story was made into a blockbuster featuring Julia Roberts, is starting this campaign at a time when public fury at these resource-draining data centres is growing across the US.

Serena Returns: The indomitable Serena Williams, now aged 44, returned to Wimbledon to play Maya Joint, 24 years her junior, after a break of four years. This made her the second-oldest player to appear in the women’s singles draw at Wimbledon; Martina Navratilova competed at 47 in 2004. She lost, but then as Novak Djokovic said: “For her to come back after years of being absent from the tour, two children later, and to give so much effort to, not just for her own satisfaction or coming back on the tour, but also to give all of us a pleasure of seeing her back on the court — in singles as well as doubles — is remarkable.”

As you step into the weekend, let us recommend some fun, witty as well some sobering reading and listening.

Untranslatable Food Words: ‘Zankha’ is Arabic for an unpleasant odour but rancid or stench cannot quite capture the repulsiveness the word demands. Or take ‘khyali pulao’, literally translates to ‘Pulao of imagination’ does not come close to the dreamy timepass that only Hindi and Urdu speakers can conjure up. This delightful essay in the Vittles magazine, puts together ‘untranslatable words’ in their ‘mother tongues’— like Nhậu in Vietnamese which means ‘eating or drinking with no particular purpose’. Now, that is an activity that we can totally get behind.

The New Space Race: Space exploration during the Cold War was geopolitical dominance alright, but it was also the scientific advances and the joy of discovering the glorious vistas of our universe. Consider it now, where the Space race has become somewhat of a libertarian capitalist project. ‘It’s futile to deny that we got the Space Age we got because one country grew drunk on capitalism and is still zealous about defending its mythic exceptionalism beyond the literal ends of the earth’, argues this essay in the New Republic.

Conversation with Joe Sacco: Joe Sacco, the comics journalist who has documented war–from Palestine to Bosnia–turns his eye to the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots in Uttar Pradesh against the backdrop of a new polarised India. His new book The Once and Future Riot has a life of controversy of its own when Penguin India withdrew from distributing the book in India. In this Himal podcast, Joe Sacco talks about his work, censorship and more.

Want to explore more newsletters? In Postcards, we send you missives on the places, people and ideas that brought Team BehanBox joy. Our monthly offering Postscript invites you, the reader, into our newsroom to understand how the stories you read came to be – from ideation to execution. Subscribe for more.

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Our weekly newsletter brings you our top stories, gender news from the world, and our team’s reading recommendations.

Hello and welcome to BehanVox!

We start with a worrying development. Mahrang Baloch was all of 16 when her father, a political activist, Abdul Ghaffar Langove, went missing. Balochistan has a long history of insurgency that has been repressed with a rough hand. The family’s painful search for him set Mahrang on the path to resistance in an area that has a long history of insurgency. Three years later his body was found, the family say, with marks of torture. Since then she has been the face of the campaigns seeking answers about the people who have disappeared in Balochistan. Three years ago, she led hundreds of women on a 1,600km march from Turbat to Islamabad. She was arrested twice during the journey and then again last year. Mahrang, now 33, faces life term after a hurried online trial this week which she refused to attend. Activists and rights groups allege that ethnic Baloch people have disappeared in thousands over the last 20 years, and condemned the verdict.

Now onto regular programming. This week we bring you a close look at the workday of a teacher who is working as a Census enumerator in Maharashtra. And our weekly dose of recommendations to keep you company over the weekend.

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She has another name but we call her ‘Garima’. She is among the 33 lakh enumerators out on the field across India initiating the mammoth task of enumerating the country’s more than 1 billion citizens, their livelihoods, choices and identities. And for obvious reasons she cannot talk openly about her anxieties, except under an assumed name.

But there is nothing fictional about Garima’s workday and worklife as an enumerator, it mirrors the reality of every single person who has undertaken the task – the heat, dust, repetitive physical labour, the mental and emotional effort of interacting with people who may or may not be cooperative.

A teacher from Maharashtra, she has been visiting close to 300 houses under the merciless sun of an exceptional summer. Her discomfort is the same that several ASHA workers from Mumbai spoke about for this BehanBox story. Each home needs at least three visits, entering people’s data into an app and answering questions. Then Garima has to draw maps of the area annotated with house numbers, roads, other landmarks, with guiding arrows. These will be verified later using geo-tagging, and submitted as hard copies for her work to be considered complete.

“It’s funny they are calling this a digital Census,” she says, given the disproportionate amount of time being spent on manual work.

Read a chronicle of her workday here.

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War Crimes: A UN commission of inquiry has concluded that about 30% of those killed in Gaza by Israeli forces since the war began in October 2023 were children. The report released this week said that attacks on maternity and neonatal units, along with an aid blockade, have hit children’s chances of survival in Gaza. The children’s institutions that have been destroyed are orphanages and schools. It also reported that Palestinian children have been arrested, tortured and subjected to sexual abuse in detention. A UNICEF report estimates that over 50,000 children have been killed or wounded in this war, with at least one Palestinian child killed on average every day.

Protest Next Week: Agricultural workers, labour unions and grassroots activists will launch a nationwide protest on July 1 against the Viksit Bharat – Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) or VB-G RAM G. This is the day the new law will be enforced in place of the critical Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). As BehanBox had explained through an interview and an analysis (here and here), this will mark a profound shift in India’s approach to rural livelihoods because it will dismantle a rights-based framework that had become a lifeline for millions of rural women farmers and workers. MGNREGS is a critical instrument of economic citizenship for women, offering them bargaining clout in the employment market and an alternative to exploitative labour practices. The new Act also significantly dilutes the MGNREGS’ decentralised architecture while shifting a greater fiscal burden onto states.

Iranian singer: Parastoo Ahmadi, an Iranian singer, and eight members of a production team, have been reportedly sentenced to 74 lashes for performing in a concert livestreamed on her YouTube channel in 2024. The criminal court of Qom province sentenced them to flogging, a two-year ban on leaving the country and a two-year ban on artistic activities for recording and publishing “vulgar and immoral content” online. In short, for appearing without a hijab. In a unique pushback against this kind of brutal policing, a London-based artist of Iranian origin, Farbod Mehr has created a robot ‘singer’ of resistance songs, Nava. She is obviously beyond arrest and whipping.

A collection of fun, witty as well sobering reads to keep you company over the weekend.

Suitcase Of Language: Russian author Maria Stepanova’s lecture from April, published in Equator, makes for a tender read on language, home, and identity when all three collapse in the face of political exile. It is requiem for the homeland lost, and a revival of oneself. Language, Stepanova says, “is impossible to leave behind; there is always space for it in the suitcase, even if it won’t be of much use in the future. In a sense, language is the suitcase. It carries everything else, and turns ordinary possessions into a museum exhibit of a now-defunct universe.”

Utopian Promises: There are a few texts considered blasphemous, prophetic, fantastical, a holy writ — all at once — in the same way Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto is. The 1985 essay presented a vision of feminist hybrid utopia, while being presciently aware of the inherent violence of technology, the exploitation of labour and the decline of narrative in the pursuit of perfect communication (AI slop we see you). Consider this: “Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves are frighteningly inert.” This Yale Review article considers what the manifesto means today to feminists, and offers a timely reminder: to counter the skew of ideology and concentration of power, we need stories — speculative and radical and impossible — to widen our realm of possibility.

Smile For The Simile: Cool as hell, this Pudding article. Here’s a wildly fascinating analysis of similes used in popular fiction, ones that follow the “as XX as XX” form. Birds, bees, cats and cucumbers, authors’ usage of comparisons reveals much about the qualities we ascribe to people, places, and things. Our favourites, though, are the ones full of irony and whimsy. Why be just happy when you can be as happy as a catfish at a rodeo to take you on in a war of words?

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Want to explore more newsletters? In Postcards, we send you missives on the places, people and ideas that brought Team BehanBox joy. Our monthly offering Postscript invites you, the reader, into our newsroom to understand how the stories you read came to be – from ideation to execution. Subscribe for more.

In May, our reporter Saumya Kalia spoke to Garima*, a government school teacher in Maharashtra who had also been assigned Census duty. We wanted to understand, firsthand, the conditions faced by Census workers conducting surveys in extreme heat. A few days later, our colleague Anjali met a group of ASHA workers labouring through Mumbai’s oppressive summer to carry out the same exercise.

Six years behind schedule, the long-awaited Census 2026 is being billed as India’s first digital census. But, as with previous enumerations, it depends on the labour of millions of frontline workers—ASHA and Anganwadi workers, government school teachers and contractual staff. Around 3.3 million of them have been deployed to count a population of more than 1.4 billion.

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When we first spoke to Garima, she was hesitant to share her experiences, let alone have her name published. She feared official reprisal and the consequences of speaking publicly about her work. Even in fragments, however, her account revealed not only the gruelling realities of Census duty but also the largely invisible labour underpinning what is being celebrated as a landmark digital exercise. Garima’s account was a record—for the present and for posterity that made it possible to capture the texture of her working day: the relentless pace, the invisible labour, and the constant negotiation between digital tools and manual work. These were questions we had already been examining in our reporting on the increasing use of technology in health and care work.

Her testimony, alongside those of many other frontline workers, was essential to documenting the labour that underpins India’s largest state-led exercises such as the Census, vaccination campaigns, Special Intensive Revisions of electoral rolls or disaster response. Public attention invariably centres on the exercise itself and far less on the workers who make it possible, often at significant personal cost.

The challenge, however, was unlike any we had encountered before. How do you earn the trust of workers who fear that speaking candidly about their experiences could invite official scrutiny or retaliation? It has taken practice to build this trust through empathy, patience, and accountability. But in Garima’s case, there was only one way she felt she could speak freely: if her story was shared as a first-person account under the protection of anonymity.

That raised an equally important journalistic question. How does a newsroom reconcile publishing an anonymous first-person narrative—especially one by a state functionary—with the principles of transparency, verification and accountability? How do we reconcile the tension between protecting a vulnerable source and our own responsibility to readers?

Anonymity is hardly unusual in journalism. Reported stories routinely rely on unnamed sources when there is a clear public interest and a credible risk of harm. But a fully anonymised first-person narrative presents a different ethical challenge. How do you ask readers to place their trust in a voice whose identity they cannot verify? How do you preserve transparency while shielding the person whose account makes the story possible?

These questions shaped our editorial discussions. Should this remain a reported feature, woven together from anonymous interviews and observations? Or should it become a first-person account that could capture something conventional reporting often cannot—the texture of the work, the emotions in the course of the job, the compulsion to comply, the anger at the conditions, the exhaustion of the routine, and yet, the enduring sense of duty?

We realised that if our goal was to document not just what Census work entails but what it feels like to perform it, a first-person narrative was the most truthful form. That decision demanded a different kind of editorial rigour.

In moments like these, our core values become our compass. One principle is non-negotiable: our primary responsibility is to the communities whose lives and labour we document. In this case, that meant the workers carrying out the Census.

The fact that they were state functionaries did not diminish that responsibility. If anything, it heightened it. Frontline workers occupy a precarious position. They are the face of the state, but rarely its beneficiaries. Time and again, we have seen ASHA workers, Anganwadi workers, teachers and other frontline staff face disciplinary action, criminalisation or intimidation for protesting working conditions, speaking to the media or questioning official decisions.

Our duty of care, therefore, was clear. Protecting Garima’s identity was not an exception to our editorial values but an expression of them. Once we returned to that first principle—our commitment to the people we report on rather than the institutions they serve—the choice was clear.

The harder task was ensuring that, while protecting Garima’s identity, we upheld the same standards of verification, transparency and accountability that readers rightly expect of our journalism.

Some details were easy to corroborate — the nature and duration of training, work load, range of tasks. She sent us a picture of the maps of her area, which we chose not to publish for it gives away her location and identity. The details we could not confirm externally — through media reports, official documents, local sources — we did not publish. Consent was key to the conversation. Garima’s primary language is Marathi but she could converse in Hindi, so her niece facilitated the coordination before the interview and during the chat to ensure Garima felt comfortable, was aware of the risks, and nothing got lost in translation. We remained transparent about our lens of inquiry and how we planned to carry forward her testimony. Her niece also helped gauge her comfort and discomfort at different levels. It wasn’t easy for Garima. We hope, then and now, that it is the first step in building an intentional space where consent and public interest are the guiding forces to bring out crucial stories about people’s labour, longings, and lives.

Here is Garima’s account of her Census work as part of our Census Nama series. If you know any Census enumerator who is willing to share their experience of labour, please write to us at editor@behanbox.com.

That’s all for this month’s Postscript, Behans. Our eyes, ears, hearts, and inboxes are always open for your thoughts. Write to us or comment below.

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Our weekly newsletter brings you our top stories, gender news from the world, and our team’s reading recommendations.

Hello and welcome to BehanVox!

After 110 days of war that claimed thousands of lives, disrupted global trade routes, rattled energy markets, and deepened economic uncertainty across regions, the US and Iran have reportedly reached an agreement to cease hostilities and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The deal has been welcomed by many as a step toward regional stability, given the Strait’s critical role in the movement of oil and goods. Yet even as one crisis appears to ease, other disruptions continue to unfold across the world.

Closer home, India is grappling with an intensifying climate challenge. Severe heatwaves have already strained livelihoods and public health, and the emergence of El Niño conditions threatens to weaken the southwest monsoon – the lifeline of Indian agriculture. The consequences will be felt far beyond farms, affecting incomes, food security, labour markets, and migration patterns across the country.

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For millions of workers, climate stress is already reshaping patterns of migration. Drought, extreme heat, agrarian distress, and shifting labour markets are pushing people to move in search of survival and opportunity. Yet, migration does not leave vulnerability behind. Instead, as Dr Malini Ranganathan argues, climate vulnerability often travels with workers across villages, cities, and generations — a phenomenon she describes as ‘circular climate vulnerability’.

At BehanBox, we are delighted to host Dr Ranganathan, geographer and Associate Professor at American University, for a conversation on her groundbreaking research. Drawing on archival records and rich ethnographic accounts, she traces how historical and contemporary forms of climate vulnerability shape labour markets, migration, and political voice.

This week, we have a lovely book excerpt on food and memory in Kalimpong and a powerful interview with Sundaravva Patil, an ASHA worker from Gadag in Karnataka.

Can food become a way of seeing, understanding cultures in a world where it is easy to misrepresent and ‘other’ communities?

In an evocative essay, Anshu Chhetri, a teacher, reader and food enthusiast, uses the culinary landscape of Kalimpong to explore histories of migration, labour, memory and belonging. Through dishes like momo, gundruk and phambi, she traces the lives of women whose culinary knowledge shapes both home and public life.

‘Momo enjoys celebrity status in Kalimpong, and the ladies are aware of it’, she writes. ‘The reason why momo is a perfect representation of the people of the hills, and more precisely of Kalimpong, is because it has now become like an identity marker for the hill community. And in the gaze of an outsider, momo and Nepali have almost become synonymous.’

Read the essay here.

Sundaravva Patil knows every house, every person in that house and their stories in her village of Machenahalli in Karnataka’s Gadag district. She isn’t a local politician, but an ASHA worker.

“I have cared for them as I have cared for my family,” Sundaravva says. Her commitment to her work and community is evident when, In 2013, while conducting house visits in a hilly area, she suffered a severe fall that injured and displaced her left knee which needed a surgery. But Sundaravva was back at work the next day. She has gone beyond the call of her duty, sometimes spending her own money and pawning her assets to pay for the medical needs of her community.

So it hurts her that she is considered an employee with no value. As her daughter Jayashree says, “We are very proud of her. I have seen her give everything and more to this village … but I have also seen her be empty-handed more often than not. As a daughter, how do you think it feels?”

Story after story, this is a common refrain of ASHA workers and also their central political agenda. At BehanBox, we are painstakingly recording these narratives as a tribute, a record of their oral histories but more importantly as solidarity for their efforts and evidence of why things must change for a frontline healthcare workforce that is literally carrying the healthcare systems on its backs. As Sundaravva Patil says ‘It is exhausting, but there is no other choice. If we don’t constantly raise our voice, nothing will change for us.’

Read the interview by Aisiri Amin here.

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Period Tax in Pakistan: The Pakistan government has announced plans to abolish the “period tax” on menstrual hygiene products as part of its 2026–27 budget. The move follows sustained campaigning by young activists and legal advocates like 25-year-old Mahnoor Omer and 29-year-old Ahsan Jehangir Khan, who brought a court case last year in a bid to get sanitary products zero-rated, so that they would not be subject to taxes of any kind. Pakistan currently imposes an 18% sales tax on locally produced sanitary products and an additional 25% customs duty on imported products.

Australia Plus in the UK: The UK government plans to ban under-16s from accessing major social media platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook, YouTube, and X. The proposal, modelled partly on Australia’s approach, is expected to be implemented in 2027 and would be accompanied by stricter controls on features such as livestreaming and communication with strangers. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has framed the move as a way to “give children their childhood back”. The UK is part of a broader international trend with Australia, France, Denmark, Greece, and others are considering or implementing age-based restrictions on social media amid growing concerns about children’s online safety and wellbeing.

Church’s Reckoning: The Church of England has apologized for its role in the forced adoption practices that affected tens of thousands of unmarried pregnant women and girls in England and Wales. Many were sent to church-run mother-and-baby homes, where they faced stigma and pressure to give up their babies for adoption. In its apology, the church acknowledged the pain, shame, and lasting trauma experienced by those affected, admitting that the treatment they received was wrong and expressed deep remorse for the suffering caused by Christian institutions. The apology follows years of advocacy by survivors seeking recognition and accountability for these practices.

Queer rights in Africa: Ghana’s LGBTQ+ community is experiencing heightened fear after parliament approved a bill that criminalises identifying as LGBTQ+ and promoting activities, with penalties of three to 10 years in prison. The legislation is expected to be signed into law by President John Dramani Mahama, prompting concerns from rights groups that LGBTQ+ people could face increased discrimination, loss of housing, employment, and healthcare access. In response, many individuals are removing online content and concealing their identities to avoid being targeted. In Botswana, couple Bonolo Selelo and Tsholofelo Kumile are going to court for the right to wed but face fierce opposition from church groups.

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A collection of fun, witty as well sobering reads to keep you company over the weekend.

The fate of Mlaheeyeh : In Jdeidet Marjayoun, a South Lebanese town, Mlaheeyeh was once a ubiquitous dish. Search for it today and you will find precious little. This is what war does to people and memories–the kind of loss that usually enters the record too late, if it enters at all, the food that disappears when the conditions that made it possible are destroyed. But as resistance, the emigre Marjayounis to Oklahoma City in the US have preserved the dish far away from home. In continuation with our unintended theme this month on food and memory, read this essay by Nada Bakri on how a Lebanese dish survived for a century in Oklahoma.

History of Film Censorship: How can boring government gazettes, where the minutiae of its proceedings are recorded in the most sterile manner, be a source of joy? Data and archive geek Aman Bhargava neatly persuades us with the opening to his new project on the history of film censorship with Henry David Thoreau’s line: ‘So, in the largest sense, we find only the world we look for.’ Read this if you are a data geek or a film buff, but you will find utmost pleasure if you are the sort of person who is able to find joy in the mundane.

Dear Roxanne: ‘Tis the season of football. There will be predictable heroes and some unpredictable ones. Yan Diomande always was one, for his sister Roxanne. ‘Ronaldo is good but my brother is better’, she’d say. This letter from Yan to Roxanne is a love letter to his sister, to sport, to his idols and to love. ‘We’re leaving for the World Cup tomorrow. For real. Your brother is going to play for Côte d’Ivoire, like Drogba, like Yaya, like Gervinho.’ Get some tissues in hand and read this beautiful piece this weekend.

Want to explore more newsletters? In Postcards, we send you missives on the places, people and ideas that brought Team BehanBox joy. Our monthly offering Postscript invites you, the reader, into our newsroom to understand how the stories you read came to be – from ideation to execution. Subscribe for more.

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Our weekly newsletter brings you our top stories, gender news from the world, and our team’s reading recommendations.

Hello and welcome to BehanVox! 

When temperatures surged across northern regions last month, the health ministry advised, with no sense of irony, people to stay hydrated, avoid midday sun, wear light cotton clothing, and consume fruits and electrolyte-rich fluids. Exactly who this advisory addresses is clear in the guidelines themselves – those who can afford to stay indoors at high noon, hold jobs and have lives where food and water intake can be afforded and regulated and have a say in how their day shapes up. As our reporting has shown, the people most vulnerable to extreme heat are often those with the fewest resources and the least control over their working conditions. At BehanBox, we are working with gig workers and domestic workers’ unions in Delhi, Patna and Jaipur to map the financial implications of heat. You will hear more on this from us in the coming weeks.

This week, we bring you a field report from Mumbai on how health-workers who have been assigned Census duties – on top of their regular tasks – are dealing with the terrible heat wave with high humidity levels that the megapolis is facing. And snippets on how an interesting and vociferous pushback against misogyny in cinema and comedy clubs is finally showing results.

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The ASHA workers on Census duty in Mumbai have been given a “kit” – a thin white cap, a bunch of pens and a bag so tacky it cannot hold a bottle of water. Out in the afternoon sun that often burns at 40 degree Celsius and enervating humidity, they have to bank on their survival instincts and the solidarity of their colleagues to protect themselves from heat stroke.

“What do we do if our work timings are 9am to 2pm? We cannot miss work. Our payments have already been withheld for months without any reason. Even if we take leave because we are sick we are not paid,” says Trupti Praveen Manjalkar, 37, who manages the health of 4,000 in Warli’s Jijamata Nagar, a predominantly Dalit neighbourhood.

In Maharashtra Nagar’s bastis in Mankhurd, Ranjeeta Awale, 37, and Vanita Rajendra Detake, 45, weave through the lanes, completing their Census round for the day, their heads covered with dupattas. Many of the doors are locked, for one this is the middle of a working day and then, it is vacation time, the month when many migrant families leave the city to visit their home towns and villages. 

A 2025 HeatWatch report on ASHA workers suggested climate safety kits and infrastructure, mandatory heat breaks during the day, clear restrictions on scheduling ad-hoc work during summers, and the development of heat action plans in consultation with ASHAs workers. None of these ideas, we saw on the field, had been implemented.

And when the heat abates, monsoon mayhem will set in, flooding the basti roads, pushing garbage around, the sewage water mixing with rain. Through all this the ASHA workers on Census duty will have to trudge filling in survey documents.

“Yevda varsha, oon, paus, vaara, aghadi thandi, hya sagdya goshti chi parva nahi karta, aarogyasevika hya kaam kartat (despite this much heat, rain, wind and extreme cold, health workers have set aside their own wellbeing and done their work for years),” she says matter-of-factly. 

The workers pay for their own water, drink as little of it as possible, carry ORS, call respondents instead of visiting them and sometimes pool in resources to buy a fan at the health post where they report. And, bank on the kindness of the households that they visit. Women who are menstruating or dealing with menopause have it hardest. 

Read our story here.

Most of us think that on demand platforms for domestic workers is a recent development, an idea that took off after Urban Company’s Instahelp was launched. But by 2023 there were already few experimental start-ups, such as Beegle in Bengaluru and MaidHub in Pune, though organised through placement agencies, website-based services, and telephone networks, says researcher Hitesh Poddar in an essay for BehanBox.

The new platforms came with the promise of change – a tool to enable workers to maximise earnings, optimise their day, enjoy flexibility and work within a structure of almost formal employment and the dignity that brings. What they did was to perpetuate and exacerbate old domestic labour systems of inequities and exacerbation. It has left workers overworked, exhausted, and in little control of their day. 

For Shanti*, this intensity is both enabling and exhausting. She migrated to Mumbai after a family crisis, carrying debt and responsibility for three children. On the platform, she works nearly 12-hour shifts earning about Rs 1,000 a day. Within months, she repaid her loan, brought her children to the city, enrolled them in school, and improved her rented home. But the costs are evident– significant weight loss and persistent joint pain that often requires medication to sleep.

There is a broader shift in how domestic work is organised and mediated today in Indian cities, through apps and algorithms. 

Read our story here.

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Cinema: A report two years ago by Ayesha Minhaz in Frontline had pointed to how the Telugu film constantly rehashes some of the most sexist, misogynistic, and patriarchal cinematic tropes in Indian cinema. This, she said, includes rape jokes, forced nudity, scenes of sexual assault and so on. A latest Telugu release, Peddi -- tailored for all-India release and directed by Buchi Babu Sana and featuring Jahnavi Kapoor and Ram Charan -- and featuring gratuitous scenes hypersexualising the female lead, and ignoring questions of consent, reconfirms this criticism. This time however young viewers have expressed their disgust at this school of filmmaking. And unusually enough, the director has not just issued an apology but also promised edits to the film. All of which we hope will make some difference.

Standing Up: It is one of the worst kept secrets of the standup circuit that for male comedians, sexist jokes with a dash of incel angst make for a fast path to popularity both on social media and on stage. But this week, comedian Pranit More and his highly objectionable interactions with his audience at an event in Gurgaon clearly crossed way too many boundaries. A viral video of casual sexism and entitlement made its rounds, followed by massive backlash, and then a particularly vicious audience member lost his job and More went incommunicado after a vapid apology. Will this make a difference to how many young men actually think and talk? No, but for the while the fury is quite satisfying.

Nation Builders: In 2023, we wrote about the courts’ failure in meaningfully recognising women’s labour at home. A Supreme Court judgment this week has assuaged some of those concerns, recognising women as “nation builders” and putting the minimum value of a homemaker’s unpaid care work at Rs 30,000. The work makes possible economic activity and has a negative effect on women’s labour force participation, the bench noted in the accident compensation case. And still, it remained shy of pushing for redistributing care work, reinforcing the gender norm that only women are duty bound to provide care. 

Iran To US To CAR: Among the two dozen migrants the Trump administration is planning to deport to the poverty and conflict-ridden Central African Republic are two Iranian women who had sought refuge in the US, the NYT reports. The women have no criminal record and were granted protection from deportation to Iran where they fear persecution for ideological reasons.

Afghan Women Protest: In a rare protest in Herat, both men and women had marched last week against the harsh Islamic dress code imposed by the Taliban. The Taliban police opened fire on the protestors who were campaigning against the arrest of women accused of "improperly wearing the hijab". A BBC report says that the firing left two persons dead and many injured. 

Reading Room: In Chengdu, in southwest China, a small community of women can now enjoy the pleasures of a small feminist bookstore, reports the Guardian in the first of a four-part series on women and society in China. Set up by Shen Shen, 42, it features books by feminist authors from across the world such as Judith Butler, Simone de Beauvoir and Chizuko Ueno. There are also small discussion groups that talk about gender issues. This may not seem like a rebellious act elsewhere but in China, feminism often attracts the charge of provoking “gender antagonism” between men and women. As in other parts of the world, the political leadership here is pushing for a return to traditional family values and roles for women, says the report. 

As you step into the weekend, let us recommend some fun, witty as well some sobering reading and listening.

The Devil’s Child: Mako Nishimura fought her way into the Japanese underworld, but drug addiction and the slow demise of organised crime gangs almost destroyed her. Yakuza, that’s what the Japanese mob are called.

A City By the Working Class: Faridabad, a satellite town of Delhi, has fascinating socialist history, one that was built by the refugees rendered homeless by the Partition. Read this fascinating account of a city that is at once a study of history, tensions between socialism and capitalism, governmentality and above all the promise of idealism.

Not Today, Hades: Just what happened after Icarus flew too close to the sun? Or is there per chance a neglected compassion in the sordid profession of Cereberus, the three-headed dog that guards the underworld? This American Life podcast spins the wheel of time and profiles people living Greek myths in real time. A divine recommendation indeed.

Want to explore more newsletters? In Postcards, we send you missives on the places, people and ideas that brought Team BehanBox joy. Our monthly offering Postscript invites you, the reader, into our newsroom to understand how the stories you read came to be – from ideation to execution. Subscribe for more.

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Our weekly newsletter brings you our top stories, gender news from the world, and our team’s reading recommendations.

Hello and welcome to BehanVox!

The passing of Marjane Satrapi this week cast a pall of gloom over the literary world. When it appeared in 2000, Iran-born Marjane’s Persepolis was a revelation. Told through the eyes of a 10-year-old, and set in the tumultuous era of the Islamic revolution in Iran, it brought to us, in vivid black and white visuals and moving words, the story of how religious extremism was to change an entire society, particularly the lives of its women. Last year, she ⁠refused the Legion of Honour, to protest France’s – and the West’s – “hypocritical attitude” toward Iran. Rest in power, Marjane!

This week, we have an investigative report that delves into the senselessness of implementing an outdated family planning campaign in a community that is fast disappearing. And the story of a women farmers’ collective that is changing how rural communities live and work in Uttarakhand.

There was a time when the government’s obsessive concerns around Malthusian population concerns were visible in public spaces around India. The ‘lal trikon (red triangle)’ of the Family Planning campaign, the snappy hum do hamare do slogan and Nirodh, the public sector produced condom – these were visible just about everywhere, at bus stops, hoardings, newspaper ads, promos during movies. Your big family size, the campaigns implied, was a headache for a young country trying to beat back poverty, hunger and stagnation. Your duty as a citizen thus lay in keeping it small.

A lot of this has changed over the decades. We now know that historical inequalities of class and caste also are a drag on development. The excesses of Emergency and its forced male sterilisations, the terrible tragedies of the botched mass sterilisation campaigns for women all forced us to rethink the state’s right to issue population diktats.

Now that fertility rates are declining across the south, what happens to marginalised tribal populations who are confronted with declining population numbers that are still being held to the hum do hamare do standard?

An intensely investigated story this week in BehanBox by Nithya Pandian tells the story of such a community – the Adi Kurumbas of Nilgiris, a particularly vulnerable tribal group. Among the stories Nithya explores is of Karthika*, 26-year-old from the community who had been admitted to the government hospital in Ooty to deliver her second baby in 2021. She alleges that she was put through a tubectomy without her consent. “They did not discuss this with me, or my husband, or my in-laws. After the C-Section, they conducted a sterilisation procedure. We came to know about it only two days later,” she recalls. When confronted later, doctors and nurses refused to tell her why she had not been informed.

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The women interviewed spoke of discourteous, peremptory and condescending behaviour on part of the health professionals. It may not be coercion of the Emergency era but the women said they were not counselled or told about their contraceptive options, as guidelines now require. They also said that this emphasis on sterilisation after two children has imperilled their community which is already dealing with a declining population. Official surveys have shown that the number of Alu Kurumbas has been falling steadily. And an aggressive population control push could lead to their erasure.

Read our story here.

Vimla Pundeer, 56, owns a two room homestay in Silkoti village in Chamba block facing the Himalayas. Her orchard and vegetable farm are full of lemons, plums, peaches and apples, peas and spinach. Together, they offer travellers an experience of Garhwali hospitality and food. There are 25 other such homestays across Chamba run by women who are part of a farmers producers organisation, Him Vikas.

Villages such as Silkoti in Chamba had been on the brink of an ecological and agricultural crisis around 2010. Rains had turned sporadic, snowfall became sparse, and for several reasons, the springs that feed entire Himalayan villages had dried up. The farm and orchard yield declined and there was massive migration to cities. Traditional methods of farming and living suddenly looked unviable.

This is when women decided to collectivise as self help groups and form an FPO under the project, Himmotthan. They understood how to use alternative farming techniques, processing methods and markets. They learnt how to revive springs by clearing out trenches. In five years, changes began to become clear in their lives and livelihoods.

It returned hours to the women’s days, time that was earlier spent lugging buckets and pots of water several times in a day down from the springs to feed the family, farms and livestock. With that time they learnt how to run homestays and become guides on the lovely nature trails that crisscross the area.

“I have seen three worlds in my life. After marriage, my days were spent with buffaloes, cows and goats. Then came the years of raising children, sending them to school and cooking on firewood. And now this life, where I host guests and show them our village,” says Vimla. “Now I have both gas and a wood stove. I cook our Garhwali cuisine for visitors, and they like it very much.”

Read our story here.

Census and Consensus: Census enumerators say they have been asked by senior officials to revisit household and “correct” data discrepancies that become apparent when government records are compared to their own findings, according to a report in The Hindu. These relate to issues such open defecation and household access to LPG and electricity, according to the report. Enumerators have also alleged that they have been asked not to ‘select options that may show the government in poor light’, adds the report.

Sterilisations: The onus of family planning still sits overwhelmingly on women, says the latest National Family Health Survey-6 cited by The Times of India. Female sterilisations stood at 36.5% and male at 0.5%; in the last survey these numbers were 37.9% for women and 0.3% for men. The survey also revealed that married women (15-49 years) were participating in household decision making in larger numbers in rural and urban areas at 88% and 91.4%, respectively. However, an analysis by Newsminute has concluded that the survey has omitted critical indicators – down to 101 from 131 in the last survey – relating to anaemia, sex ratio at birth, infant and child mortality and quality of family planning services.

Tennis Tantrum: After he lost a game to a French teen, Moise Kouame, Paraguayan tennis player Adolfo Vallejo attributed his loss to the woman who umpired the game, Ana Carvalho. He blamed her for being unable to control the home crowds at the French Open, insisting that a high pressure game environment “has to be refereed by a man”. He has been fined $65,000 for his remark.

Timeless Tracks: She never quite got the fame she deserved in Bollywood but Suman Kalyanpur, who passed away this week aged 89, had a fiercely loyal fanhood of her own. Many of her songs became anthems in their own right – for an entire generation, Mere mehboob na jaa was the eternal song of the ghost in white, Aaj kal tere mere pyaar ke charche the tune to shimmy to, and of course, Na tum humme jaano the soundtrack of heartache. Some of her loveliest songs were duets with Mohammed Rafi who for a while had stopped singing with Lata Mangeshkar over professional differences. Those swoony love duets still work magic – Thehariye hosh mein aa loon or Baad muddat ke yeh ghadi. With her, an entire generation of Hindi film playback singers has now left us.

As you step into the weekend, let us recommend some fun, witty as well some sobering reading and listening.

Many Worlds: Ayşegül Savaş is one of the few writers who holds on her page, with great care, relationships and modernity. Her new story centres the lives of a young expat couple, Defne and Mete; there is intellectual companionship, academic disenchantment, and class relations. The writing, with its signature deceptive ease, holds a mirror to the self and its fragmentation when faced with conflicting choices. It is both a lament and ode to the ineffable, impossible desire to hold space for many versions and inhabit many realities, simultaneously.

Marjane Satrapi: “Today, the description of the world is always reduced to yes or no, black or white. Superficial stories. Superhero stories. One side is the good one. The other one is evil. But I’m not a moral lesson giver. It’s not for me to say what is right or wrong. I describe situations as honestly as possible. The way I saw it. That’s why I use my own life as material. I have seen these things myself, and now I’m telling it to you. Because the world is not about Batman and Robin fighting the Joker; things are more complicated than that. And nothing is scarier than the people who try to find easy answers to complicated questions.” Here is an old interview with Marjane Satrapi that is an essential reminder of truth, power and justice.

Welcome, Valued Employee: Here is something fun for the weekend. The Wired took all of its reportage on AI and designed this beautiful game, which will help you think while you chuckle. Our favourite small print: *Compliance does not guarantee your nonredundancy. Read this along with The Pope’s Encyclical Maginifica Humanitas.

Want to explore more newsletters? In Postcards, we send you missives on the places, people and ideas that brought Team BehanBox joy. Our monthly offering Postscript invites you, the reader, into our newsroom to understand how the stories you read came to be – from ideation to execution. Subscribe for more.

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Our weekly newsletter brings you our top stories, gender news from the world, and our team’s reading recommendations.

Hello and welcome to BehanVox!

As India and much of the world reel under relentless heatwaves, governments remain unprepared — or indifferent — to how extreme heat affects workers, women and the most marginalised. We are left with platitudes about community care, while our reporting continues to show how heat action plans fail those most vulnerable.

At BehanBox this week, we stayed ASHA-heavy — yes, hope, but also the 1 million-strong women-led health workforce at the centre of our feminist historiography project, The ASHA Story.

We published two powerful stories from a six-month investigation into how caste shapes ASHA work in India. We also featured an interview with ASHA worker Punam, adding to our growing archive of personal histories.

Plus, news from around the world and, as always, excellent book and podcast recommendations.

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No institution in India exists outside the shadow of caste, and ASHA work is no exception. But anecdotal evidence was inadequate and we wanted to document exactly how caste shapes the everyday realities of ASHA workers. Over six months, Sarasvati Thuppadolla travelled across Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, speaking to Dalit ASHA workers about caste discrimination on the job. She then designed a detailed questionnaire and surveyed 70 ASHA workers, including 52 Scheduled Caste workers, to begin mapping the scale and patterns of caste-based discrimination within the workforce.

In doing this ‘Care and Caste’ project, we found searing accounts of caste-based discrimination that ranged from overt exclusion and untouchability to more covert, everyday forms of prejudice. It affects everything from relationships to care work, from incentives to leadership and growth opportunities and most importantly their dignity and mental health.

Our survey threw up significant insights. Around 48% of ASHA workers reported to have been explicitly asked about their caste identity during their initial interactions with the community. At least 44% reported having faced discrimination at least once in their work by village residents, while 7.7% said that they had seen it happen to others even if they did not experience it first hand. Up to 65% of the ASHA workers in our survey said that one’s upper-caste identity, money and local political connections determined their chances of appointment as an ASHA worker.

Sneha Kumari*, belonging to the Ravidas community, narrates an incident where a Rajput community member asked her if she was an ‘achhoot’ (untouchable), she shot back — “If I cut myself, does my blood say that I am Chamaar and yours Rajput?'“

One reader told us the comment was heartbreaking but it was the fierce pushback that stayed with her.

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Read the two-part investigation here and here. Pair this with this first-person interview with Dharmishtha Chauhan, who tells us how caste and disability shape her experience with care work.

In this month’s The ASHA Story’s oral history project, we feature Punam Amol Ahire, a 34-year-old Dalit ASHA worker from Chembur in Mumbai. This is the first personal history of an urban ASHA worker in our series — one that comes with its own set of challenges.

A part-time domestic worker, her workday stretches 20 hours. During the day, she works in the M-West Ward in Suman Nagar, managing vaccines, vector borne diseases, making sure there are no pools of stagnant water in the area and now, conducting Census work. And she shows up to do this no matter what – extreme heat, and waterlogging, all a part of the city’s extreme weather conditions.

Punam tells us about her hectic work schedule, the many problems it brings, the apathy of the public officials she deals with and the penalties she still pays for being active in a union.

Read the interview here.

SC On SIR: This week, the Supreme Court upheld the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls as an exercise in furtherance of the Constitutional obligation to conduct free, fair and credible elections. But it also maintained that the EC can examine citizenship status only for the purpose of determining inclusion in the voter list and the deletions do not imply that a person is not a citizen. However, states such as West Bengal and Bihar have already stated that they will deny welfare schemes to those whose names have been deleted during the SIR.

Citizenship And Cash Schemes: About 30 lakh women beneficiaries of Lakshmir Bhandar scheme are ineligible to receive cash transfer schemes, said Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari this week per reports. The new BJP government conducted a “comprehensive cleansing and verification” of the list based on the SIR, despite evidence that it disproportionately excludes women, to determine eligibility for its Annapurna Yojana that doubles cash incentives from Rs 1,500 to Rs 3,000. While TMC’s Lakshmi Bhandir was universal, BJP’s Yojana requires almost 2.2 crore beneficiaries to prove their eligibility by filling a laborious 11-page form, seeking details of one’s Aadhaar, bank, land documents, and more, reported The Hindu.

Detention Centres: The West Bengal government has also opened one detention centre in Murshidabad and is readying another at Malda for ‘illegal immigrants’, primarily Bangladeshi and Rohingya. This comes within two days of the state’s newly sworn in BJP government ordering the setting up of such centres in all districts across the state. Indian Express reports that as per a police official, three people suspected of being illegal immigrants have been brought to the Murshidabad centre. Assam is already running centres like these that have been criticised for their disregard of human rights.

Pope On AI: In a radical move, Pope Leo presented a critical document warning that artificial intelligence needs to be “disarmed”, as per the BBC. “The word is strong, I know, but deliberately chosen because this moment needs words capable of attracting attention,” he said. What he issued is called an ‘encyclicals’ -- letters to Catholic bishops that also serve as a papal message to the world. He particularly stressed the use of AI in warfare. Titled, “Magnifica Humanitas (magnificent humanity)”, the document was presented in the presence of AI experts including Christopher Olah, the co-founder of Anthropic.

Now Insta Carry: After eight-minute deliveries, 10-minute domestic worker and other such ideas, yet another start up has found a new way to use cash in on the widespread joblessness affecting the young – an app to book an “assistant” for as little as 30 minutes (for Rs 149) to help with shopping bags in a market or to stand in a queue you cannot be bothered with. CarryMen offers “packages” for up to four hours of work, and is currently offering a discount at Rs 79 for the 30 minute deal.

Movies At 60: We all loved Paddington, Babe and The Sheep Detectives, but this is a really appalling figure: Hollywood films were also four times more likely to feature a talking animal in the lead role than an older woman, says a campaign by The Age Without Limits. The study also found that just five of the 100 highest-grossing films over the past three years have starred a woman older than 60.

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As you step into the weekend, let us recommend some fun, witty as well some sobering reading and listening.

An Hour With Deborah Levy: All ye Deborah Levy fans, rejoice! There is a genre-defying new book, where Levy places herself in Paris to author a portrait of the “impossible to write” modernist artist Gertrude Stein. Hear her talk about this time travel, about struggling and creating, and the thrill of artistic friendships.

The Politics of India’s Air Pollution Measurement: Politicians in India have long denied – and arguably gaslit the public about – the scale of the air pollution crisis, even as millions breathe toxic air every day. A new investigation by journalist Rishika Pardikar, based on RTI documents around the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS), shows how this denial continues to shape and constrain policymaking.

Cities in Fiction: Remember Malgudi? Fictional, yes, but rooted in a particular imagination of place — some would say, a distinctly Brahminical one. A project, Cities in Fiction, by scholars Divya Ravindranath and Apoorva Saini, maps Indian literature through its geographies, asking what our stories reveal and erase about the places we inhabit. It’s a stunning archive, and perfect weekend browsing. You may even find your next read there.

Want to explore more newsletters? In Postcards, we send you missives on the places, people and ideas that brought Team BehanBox joy. Our monthly offering Postscript invites you, the reader, into our newsroom to understand how the stories you read came to be – from ideation to execution. Subscribe for more.

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Our weekly newsletter brings you our top stories, gender news from the world, and our team’s reading recommendations.

Hello and welcome to BehanVox! This was a week when the surreal became real. Somehow nothing works as well as satire when the world around is falling apart and there seems to be no light at the end of the tunnel. Remember Nisha Susan’s marvellous Pink Chaddi campaign that stumped the right wing campaign against women’s freedom to spend an evening as they wished? Or Pulkit Mani’s recent hysterically funny video where the bizarre was closer to the bone than was comfortable. Now comes the Cockroach Janata Party. Is it a meme? Is it a party? Is it both? Floated over social media as a response to Chief Justice Surya Kant’s comment about the unemployed (later denied), it has now acquired a life that falls in the twilight zone. The “party” now has over 1 lakh joinees, more followers than the BJP on Instagram, a whole website and an anthem and the following of prominent critics of the government. It claims to the voice of Gen Z exhausted by the cynicism and corruption we see around us, the representative of “the Lazy & Unemployed” and its agenda demands sweeping changes — among them no post-retirement Rajya Sabha seats for Chief Justices, bans on defecting legislators and greater representation for women in governance. But beneath the humour lies a sharp critique of unemployment, institutional elitism, political privilege and youth frustration. Whichever this viral moment spins out in the coming days, according to Wall-E, the movie robot, only cockroaches will survive the apocalypse.

In this newsletter we bring you glimpses of a gripping interview with the linguist GN Devy in which he tells us why the ongoing online, self-enumeration Census 2027 is problematic for more reasons than one. And gender news from around India and the world.

GN Devy is an acclaimed linguist but equally importantly he is an outspoken cultural activist who uses his profound knowledge of all communities but especially the marginalised to critique how regimes deal with those who are voiceless. We could of course have sought out a data specialist to interview on the Census and what it implies but then a population census is never just about numbers and this one comes way after it should have and brings in its wake many questions that only someone with the breadth of understanding of people that Devy has.

In 2013, a People’s Linguistic Survey of India – almost 50 volumes of 35,000 printed pages – was published as a record of India’s languages and by extension, its people. Devy had led the exercise. The survey found 780 languages while the government officially recognises only 22. To Devy, the privileged elite had sidelined languages over decades, disempowering identities and destroying whole knowledge systems. The same story – of dominance and exclusion – is now playing out with the Census in India, he says.

“The Census has to give a complete photographic image of the nation… but this Census is trying to doctor the photograph even before the exercise started,” Devy says.

There are many concerns around this Census – there are questions of deliberate delays, opaque processes, and a lack of accountability. And other fears around the method. India’s first digital Census brings with it worries about data security, data hygiene, and misuse in a country where digital preparedness is low and cybercrime has almost doubled between 2022 and 2024.

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But the biggest problem for Devy is that it will end up serving a political cause instead of being what a census should be – a photograph of the nation, not the desired image of it.

There is also the gender dynamic. “One thing is that the population growth in different states is directly related to education and health access for women, which the state governments haven’t been able to provide sufficiently and equitably across the country. The second is the women’s reservation, which was passed in the parliament in 2023, and easily could have been implemented without any delimitation process since that was a matter of proportionate seats and not dependent on how many MPs are in the Parliament or Assemblies. One-third can be of anything – of 30 or 300 or 3000. But this government was cynical about women’s reservation. There was no need to tie it up with the Census or the delimitation,” Devy says.

Another issue that he has always articulated is the neglect of the highly marginalised communities such as the NT-DNT from the Census. And the role the Census has played in eliminating women’s languages. “In 1961 the Census recorded 1,652 mother tongues. In the 2011 Census, we recorded 1,369. In 50 years’ time, 283 languages were erased. These are not languages of livelihood, incomes, schooling, offices, courts, marketplaces; these are primarily spoken by women, they hold women’s memories. This Census is not ready to change its earlier methodology where it gathers the names of mother tongues and regroups them into linguistic categories [what is called ‘rationalisation’],” he points out.

Read our interview here.

Honorarium Hike: Some news to cheer in a bleak week — in its very first cabinet meeting, the newly sworn-in UDF government has announced a Rs 3,000 hike in the honorarium paid to the ASHA workers in Kerala. A monthly hike of Rs 1,000 each for Anganwadi workers and helpers, school cooking staff, pre-primary teachers and ayahs too was announced. We have been reporting from Kerala – and elsewhere – about the struggle and gruelling protests of ASHA workers about being underpaid and overworked. This was especially ironic in a state where frontline health-workers form the very backbone of the state’s acclaimed health model. The demands of the striking ASHA workers were better pay, social security benefits and work conditions.

Heat Trauma: An intense heat wave has been sweeping across India, but especially across the north – Delhi, UP, Punjab and Haryana, with temperatures in some corners hitting 48 degree C. For women who have returned to use chulhas in the wake of the LPG crisis, this means dealing with insufferable conditions at home and at work. In a special order given to deal with the LPG shortage, the Commission for Air Quality Management has declared temporary permission to burn diesel and biomass.

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Again, Yet Again: Every once in a while, with depressing regularity, the story of a dowry death swamps news headlines. This week it was 33-year-old Twisha Sharma, a former model from Noida who married into a Bhopal-based family. As usual there are two narratives – one pushed by the husband’s family of suicide and the other by the natal family of harassment and complicity. Then there is the other problem with investigating such incidents – an allegedly botched investigation where the police appear to have dragged its feet in collecting and conserving evidence.

Unquestionable: Norwegian journalist Helle Lyng has been the subject of intense trolling ever since she sought to question PM Modi on his two day visit to Oslo this week. Though he did not take the question, India has rejected her allegations that the country was guilty of human rights violations. In an interview to BBC Hindi she later said: “That’s how confrontational journalism works. You have to try to interrupt. You have to try to get more answers. And the answers that you are looking for. And, no, I did not get that.”

Sex Ratio Declines: Haryana’s sex ratio at birth for the first four months of this year dropped to 898 girls per 1,000 boys. This is a decline since last year when it stood at 923, the highest ever in the state. The state’s response was to take disciplinary action against four government doctors under Rule 7 of the Haryana Civil Services (Punishment and Appeal) Rules, 2016, for failure to arrest this decline in numbers. A notable aspect that emerged from the numbers this year is the micro regional variation in these numbers in Haryana, reports The Federal – Charkhi Dadri reported the lowest sex ratio of 768 and Rewari improved its numbers to 906.

Granta Gaffe: Another AI fraud sweeps the internet but this one is not so much about AI as it is about the prejudices of what writing from the South sounds like. The award-winning Commonwealth Story — published, unpublished, and published again in Granta — is prosaic, opaque, and incomprehensible at places, so why did the judges treat it as a postcolonial masterpiece? The answer lies not in the machine but in the biases held deep within elite metropolitan institutions, argues writer Lina Abushouk.

AI Resist List: What a joy to see tech futures that are not bleak but purposefully colourful and collaborative with people holding its centre. This living repository lists collectives, movements, micro campaigns pushing back against Big Tech and imagining radical alternatives built around care, communities, histories, beauty — the best of humanity. It is resistance and hope.

Strangers On A Bench: A podcast about nothing and everything. Artist Tom Rosenthal wanders in parks speaking to strangers, opening windows into their lives and letting us in. Audio crackles, birdsong fills the air, as lovers and plumbers and basketball fans talk about their days, what hurts and heals them. It’s simple and sweet (and awkward).

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Want to explore more newsletters? In Postcards, we send you missives on the places, people and ideas that brought Team BehanBox joy. Our monthly offering Postscript invites you, the reader, into our newsroom to understand how the stories you read came to be – from ideation to execution. Subscribe for more.

Subscribe now

Our weekly newsletter brings you our top stories, gender news from the world, and our team’s reading recommendations.

Hello and welcome to BehanVox! The states that went to the polls finally have new governments in place. But some of the feared after-effects are also beginning to come true. When we were reporting on the radical SIR exercise in West Bengal, we had written about the existential anxiety faced by those whose names had been deleted from the voter list – if their very identity and citizenship were in question, what happens to their access to critical welfare schemes? Most of those hit by the exercise come from marginalised backgrounds, as we had reported – women, Dalits, and Muslims. For someone like Ayesha Begum from Taranagar who banked heavily on the Rs 1,500 that Lakshmir Bhandar direct benefit transfer scheme brought in every month, the SIR confusion jeopardised everything. Now, the new West Bengal government under CM Suvendu Adhikari has said that those deleted would not be eligible for several government welfare schemes though this would not apply to cases being adjudicated by tribunals. In Bihar too, the BJP-led NDA government is reportedly deleting beneficiaries from ration lists after SIR dropped them from the voter list. There was another fear – that with elections out of the way the true economic impact of the war in west Asia would finally be unveiled to us. And it was. On Sunday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked Indians to adopt austerity measures to conserve the use of fuel and stop the drain of foreign exchange – cut the use of cars, use public transport, buy less gold and limit foreign travel.

We bring you this week an extensive interview on the idea of digital citizenship, what it privileges and those it marginalises.

Devina Sarwatay is a scholar of digital cultures at City St George’s, University of London. In our latest installment of BehanBox Talkies, where we engage with scholars on varied subjects, she discusses with Saumya Kalia the practice and performance – and gradual hollowing out – of citizenship online.

There was a time when you could be online or off it as you chose, built networks, friendships, explored the world and remained who you were. All of that has changed today. Caste, economics, and religion decide who receives visibility and safety online. Instances like the GrokAI sexual deepfakes reflect a failure of digital citizenship, where the vulnerable are forced to shoulder the burden of reporting and redressal.

“I could never have imagined that we are in a position where we should indeed be panicking,” says Devina. “Even as I was defending my PhD, I felt the digital space is like any other – where you have both opportunities and risks, and it’s about how you use your agency to navigate through these spaces, to be able to benefit from the opportunities and protect yourself from risks. But with Generative AI technologies, with apps like Replika or tools like GrokAI, it’s much more difficult to just exist online, especially if you are someone from a gender marginalised group.”

With the tech bro oligarchy and its pursuit of power and profit, the question for Devina is: What would we need to make those spaces safe, to make those spaces accessible for everyone, irrespective of their identity?

“Who counts as a digital citizen? Is it someone who links their Aadhaar card to bank IDs, or registers for welfare schemes online? Or is able to access gas supply by using digital payment methods? These all count as acts of digital citizenship. But it is also if you have used platforms and social media to engage with democratic debates or to engage with society at large. I would say almost everyone is a digital citizen today – but that doesn’t mean everyone can practice citizenship on equal terms,” she points out.

Read our interview here.

NEET Axed: The National Eligibility-cum Entrance Test (NEET)-UG exam, an entrance exam for undergraduate medical admissions, was cancelled just a week after it was conducted for 22.05 lakh candidates on May 3. It had emerged that some papers had been leaked before the exam. Indian Express reports that it is the first time that the National Testing Authority is cancelling the exam in its entirety though it has earlier done so for certain papers in the wake of a paper leak. BehanBox had reported on an earlier cancellation of NEET-PG exams how devastating this can be for aspirants, especially women. Medicine is a tough, time-consuming career choice for young women as they deal with the social pressures to get married and start a family. And a postponement of an exam can hit their career goals, after gruelling years of preparation.

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UCC In Assam: The implementation of the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) in Assam has been approved by the state’s cabinet. The tribal population, which has its own social customs and traditions that do not fit the UCC template, will be kept outside its purview, said Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma. The code will deal with issues relating to marriage, live-in relationships and registration of marriage and divorce. Uttarakhand was the first state to go in for UCC, followed by Gujarat. In this interview with BehanBox, feminist legal scholar Surbhi Karwa, had argued that the UCC turns the State into a father figure who decides who we love, live with and marry.

First-ever: This might be hard to believe but St Stephen’s College, Delhi, appointed its first woman principal in its 145 year history. Susan Elias, who will take the position on June 1, is a computer scientist focused on AI and interdisciplinary engineering research, and as The Print points out, her appointment makes for a shift for the elite college which has always prioritised humanities. The college had been all-male till 1975.

Lot In A Name: In a bid to shift how polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) – which afflicts one in eight women – is perceived, an international medical panel has renamed it polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome (PMOS). The panel argued that the old name misrepresented the condition and concentrated only on the ovaries while it also relates to multiple hormonal pathways, central metabolic dysfunction and broader systemic risks. The renaming, they say, will improve diagnosis, communication and patient care.

No Women In The Room: If one wants a snapshot of patriarchy, look no further than the recently-concluded US-China bilateral meeting. There were no women in sight from either delegation. Scholars and economists including Gita Gopinath scorned this spectacle of masculine, militarised power. “It’s just inexplicable how you end up with a single-gender table, given the many talented women around the world,” the former first deputy managing director of IMF told The Guardian. Globally women count for only 20% of ambassadors per one estimate, and this representation dwindles in regions like Southasia and West Asia.

Fiction Of AI: A writing professor’s discovery and dismay of finding writing infested with AI. It wasn’t akin to plagiarism or farming out the task, “but it felt like a kind of naive chicanery; a perversion of the contract between writer and reader”, he writes in The Guardian. An essay about dead perfection and the labour of creation, and an appeal to let yourself move through language.

Lol for real: And language is whimsical, playful. The pause of the period, the interrogating question mark, the sweet embrace of the parentheses. This series in Granta is all about grammar and punctuations. Our favourite: the welcome deceptions of ‘lol’, placed in a sentence to mask its emotional intensity. It is a cool vulnerability, a nod to complexity, a cipher that holds care and attention and love. Lol.

Mothers And Daughters: You’ll enjoy this Modern Love podcast if you liked The House of the Spirits, and you’ll relish it if you appreciate the charm of letters. Author Isabel Allende maintained a correspondence with her mother for years and has over 24,000 letters to show for it. It was a declaration of love, practiced daily, which changed her relationship with attention and craft.

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Hello and welcome to BehanVox! The results are in and it would appear that voters have spoken overwhelmingly for change except in Assam and Puducherry. After a particularly messy voter list revision drive, West Bengal’s mandate landed with the BJP, Kerala voted against the incumbent Left and Tamil Nadu stunned the rest of the country by backing by a huge margin a political novice but a seasoned superstar. Analysts and reports (here and here) that women drove the fates of at least two elections. That they voted against Mamata Banerjee’s TMC for not reacting effectively to the multiple incidents of sexual violence and for allowing some of its cadres to run riot on campuses and streets. And that they voted overwhelmingly – especially in urban pockets – for Vijay and his two-year old party, Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam, because they were no longer impressed with just welfare-centric Dravidian politics. As we argued in an analysis of DMK’s uniquely positioned cash transfer scheme for women, political parties rarely undo such schemes even if power shifts and instead opt to build on it, increasing or expanding its reach. Vijay’s welfare budget, this analysis concludes, will up the state’s total welfare bill by 52%.

If the run up to the election was fraught, its aftermath has been even more so. West Bengal is seeing unsettling violence on the streets. And after two days of nerve-wracking suspense when it was not clear if his allies would actually rally around, Vijay has finally mustered the support of 120 MLAs. As we wrap the newsletter, he is meeting the Governor – for the fourth time – with letters of support.

While the hurly burly of government formation unfurls in the coming days, we, at BehanBox, believe that no matter who comes to power, there is the possibility of an alternate agenda that can guide the new government’s priorities by centering marginalised groups. We will lay these out in the coming weeks.

This week, we published two articles that speak of pathbreaking shifts brought about in two diverse fields – the transformative idea of a social audit of government programmes that arrived with MGNREGA and the rise of Telugu women’s magazines in the late 19th and early 20th century that were way ahead of their times.

At BehanBox, we have been intently reporting on MGNREGA, the loopholes in its implementation and its now imperilled status. This focus on the globally acclaimed scheme, in its 20th year, is also a time to look back at its nascent years and how it pulled off some radical ideas. Three months ago, scholar Padmini Ramesh wrote for us on how it allowed ordinary people to make claims on the State, negotiate with local power structures and form friendships and networks.

This week, Sowmya Kidambi, recalls for us the radical promise that the scheme made to the rural communities of India – the right to socially audit the programme and be heard and responded to by officials. Sowmya Kidambi, now the head of the Social Work and Research Centre (Barefoot College) in Tilonia, spent 13 years running Andhra Pradesh’s social audit unit which became the template for such exercises across India.

The concept of jan sunwai, or a public hearing of grievances, was at the time an experiment in participatory democracy, premised on the idea that ordinary citizens, especially the rural poor, can and must hold the state accountable. In doing so, social audits sought to invert traditional power hierarchies, placing workers and communities at the centre of monitoring and evaluation. This became a trailblazing idea not just for India but the rest of the world as well, says Soumya.

In a social audit all relevant records such as job cards, muster rolls, sanction orders and payment details – are placed before the community. Discrepancies between official records and lived realities are identified, discussed publicly, and documented. This method privileges lived experience over technical expertise. The testimony of a worker who has not received wages, or of a villager who knows that an asset exists only on paper, is treated as valid evidence.

It is not that the system never ran into big barriers. There is administrative resistance, which has often led to delays in the presentation of provision of records and non-attendance at public hearings. Political interference was common. And worst, funds were delayed leading to over dependence on the state for the running of the audits. “Social audits are not merely technical tools; they are democratic practices. Their success ultimately depends on the willingness of the state to accept scrutiny from below,” Sowmya concludes.

Read our story here.

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Hyderabad-based History scholar Shaik Mahaboob Basha has an interesting observation about popular Telugu literature at the turn of the 19th century – the maximum number of Telugu women’s journals sprang up in that period and the record remains unbeaten even today when media has become far more democratised in every way possible. And this is true, he says, of not just Telugu, it is true of many Indian languages. The reason lies in the impact of women-centred social reforms and the rise of an educated readership.

The first of these was the monthly Gujarati journal launched in 1857, Streebodh, followed by the Bengali magazine Bamabodhini Patrika and Balabodhini in 1874. The first Telugu women’s journal was titled – and there is some irony to this – Satihita Bodhini – and its aim was to promote women’s education, widow remarriage, and social reforms. There were some interesting aspects to these magazines, to begin with at least, they were edited by men who were reformists. They carried names that indicated a patronising intent to ‘educate’ and ‘improve’ women’s lives with a lot of how-to articles that preached the ‘right’ social and familial conduct.

Later the women stepped into the field, mostly from Brahmin households. This brought a perceptible shift. By the 1920s, women editors and writers were beginning to ask uncomfortable questions about social hypocrisy, gender skews and the unfair burden of carework they carry.

Basha’s new book published by Orient BlackSwan, Scripting a New Gender Politic: Telugu Women’s Journals, 1883–1960, chronicles the rise of these magazines. This week we publish and excerpt from the chapter ‘Autonomy and Legal Reform: Debates on Child Marriage and Kanyasulkam’. In it, he traces the radical content that began showing up in many of these journals, the women who espoused these ideas and how they were received.

Why should women be expected to be pativrata when men were incapable of being patnivratas, fumed Chimakurti Satyavati Devi in the magazine Vasavi. V Saraswati in Grihalakshmi demands that women be educated so they realise that they understood their individualism. Of women taking their husband’s name, she said: ‘This is worldwide slavery in the name of modern culture. To a woman with an individuality of her own, there is no greater humiliation than this. Women should become famous not by their husbands’ names, but by their own strength, effort and capacity.’

At the Godavari District Women’s Conference, held in September 1933, Sarangu Sita Devi delivered a speech [published in Grihalakshimi] in which she spoke bitingly of men who screamed reform on public platforms but in private lives continued to subscribe to orthodoxy. “These men have simply delivered lectures from the platform and got some two to three acts passed. That’s all! [What we must remember is that] the social evils do not die out with the passage of a few acts.”

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There were questions too about religion and the place it assigns women. Would these journals have passed conservative scrutiny today? Likely not. The excerpt shows us a world where perhaps more social rules were being questioned and defied than today.

Read the excerpt here.

A Feminichi Wins: A 2024 film used a sexist Malayalam mashup of the word ‘feminist’ and the feminine suffix (-ichi) in its title – Feminichi Fathima – to tell the story of patriarchy in a conservative Muslim household. Perambara in Kozhikode now has elected its own Feminichi Fathima as its MLA. Fathima Thahiliya became the first woman leader from the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) to win an assembly election in the state. She defeated the LDF leader, TP Ramakrishnan, by a margin of 5,087 votes. Fathima is a lawyer and among the three women leaders who were sidelined for filing a sexual harassment complaint against Muslim Student Federation state president PK Nawas. Earlier too, women league leaders -- Kamarunnisa Anwar and Noorbina Rasheed -- had been fielded from Kozhikode in 1996 and 2021 respectively. Neither won. Fathima is said to be a reformist voice in the IUML, and the founding president of Haritha, the women’s wing of the Muslim Students Federation.

Clampdown: Narges Mohammadi, 54, the jailed Iranian Nobel peace prize winner, has been hospitalised for acute cardiac distress but remains under guard, say her supporters. She has been jailed for most of the last two decades for activism and was arrested last December again for publicly denouncing the Islamic republic. She has already suffered multiple heart attacks while in the Zanjan prison in northern Iran. Her family, now in Paris, and her supporters want her to be transferred to Tehran for treatment but the government remains unmoved.

Rare Nature: Two Indian women conservationists have bagged the prestigious “Green Oscars” or the Whitley Award this year. Praveen Shaikh, a scientist with the Bombay Natural History Society, has been conferred the award for her ongoing work on Indian river birds, skimmers. The other Indian awardee Barkha. Subba, works with local communities to conserve a rare amphibian, the Himalayan salamander.

Devil Wears Ambition: The vastly entertaining saga of female ambition, Devil Wears Prada, is back with a sequel and so are the debates around women and work and “having it all”. And this is one film – now two – where women unabashedly love their work. Towards the end of the new film, Meryl Streep who essays the formidable Miranda Priestly, declares after a heartbreaking setback -- “I love working.” And her once sidekick Anne Hathaway, concurs enthusiastically. Also hark back to the first film where Emily Blunt says to herself “I love my job, I love my job, I love my job…” as she grapples with a nasty cold at work. Whether you are a workaholic or not, these words come as a relief at a time when tradwives in aprons are asking women to give up their votes.

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Race, Eugenics, Silicon Valley: Of course, Jefrey Epstein had a personal eugenics project. This Coda story brings startling revelations about just how much race science is entrenched in the heart of elite institutions, Silicon Valley, and the tech industry. Buried deep in the Epstein files is the logic and fantasy of the tech industry: to control human destiny, and naturally, to replace humans.

Saffron Sea In Bengal: Assam and West Bengal are the new models of Hindutva, the ‘anti-politics’ sentiment in Tamil Nadu’s verdict, and the blurring line of defense against Hindu nationalism. All this and more in political scholar Neelanjan Sircar’s interview with the Equator magazine about the 2026 Assembly poll results.

The Art Vs Artist Debate: Put on your academic gown. In this Open to Debate podcast, under ethical scrutiny is the timeless question of separating the art from the artist. From Michael Jackson to Louis CK, there is no dearth of your favourite artist turning out to be a monster. Do the sins of the artist corrupt their work? What is the emotional harm of compartmentalising two interlinked truths?

Want to explore more newsletters? In Postcards, we send you missives on the places, people and ideas that brought Team BehanBox joy. Our monthly offering Postscript invites you, the reader, into our newsroom to understand how the stories you read came to be – from ideation to execution. Subscribe for more.

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Hello and welcome to BehanVox! The assembly elections are finally behind us and exit polls are suggesting various outcomes. But past poll prediction disasters show us why it is a good idea to wait till the results are out tomorrow. Our Feminist Election Room had analysed manifestos and we had reported extensively from the states on the issues that matter the most to voters, from debt relief for disaster-hit women in Kerala to cash transfer scheme for Tamil Nadu’s women. We had also reported from West Bengal, at the heart of a brutal electoral roll revision programme which had ended up disenfranchising women from marginalised groups, Muslims, migrants and queer persons. As election results unfurl, we will be tracking the composition of the new assembly and curating ‘alt agendas’ to guide the new governments’ priorities.

This week we published our last pre-election story from West Bengal. And brought you the next installment of our ASHA worker chronicles.

What are the fears of the lakhs of women from West Bengal, many of them from districts heavy with Muslims, Matuas and Dalits, whose names have been knocked off the voter list in the Kafkaesque SIR process? Or whose voter status is yet to be adjudicated by tribunals that could certainly not deliver their verdicts before the state election? What does it mean for their sense of citizenship or belonging to the lands they have inhabited for decades? Their anxieties around being shipped out of the country? Or being allowed to stay on but with no access to welfare schemes they so depend on to get through another day?

For answers to these questions, Sanhati Banerjee travelled to Murshidabad that sits on India’s border with Bangladesh with river Padma forming the eastern edge, and Metiabruz, a historic town just off Kolkata. She met women who have gone through several bewildering rounds of travel to screening centres far from their homes with documents in hand, none of which seem to be enough. No one has any answers for them, not even the incumbent party and its government, despite its public show of sympathy, the women said. As for the officials, they are like a brick wall of apathy.

“Ami ei gramer i beti [I am the daughter of this village],” said Nayantara Bibi, who works as a bidi labourer in Beldanga that sits at the heart of Murshidabad’s electoral battleground. “My family has lived here for seven generations. If my name is not recognised, what will happen to my children?”

The SIR in Bengal is tied to the state’s unique history of Partition in 1947, which unfolded differently from Punjab, explained Anwesha Sengupta, Assistant Professor, Institute of Development Studies Kolkata. The overlapping waves of migration across porous borders — for food, work, survival, and a shared language and culture – was the norm rather than the exception. “What was once a fluid history of movement and belonging is now being reframed through policy in ways that can exclude.”

Selina Bibi, who earns Rs 400 a week and needs to support a family of five, sits awaiting her turn at contesting the deletion of her names from the voter list at the Kazisaha Primary School in Beldanga. Alongside her are hundreds of women with similar travails.

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We do not know how many of the women we interviewed finally made it to the poll booth. But as we reported, almost 61.8% of voters who were deleted or are under adjudication are women, according to data released by the Kolkata-based non-profit Sabar Institute.

In West Bengal, which shares the border and language with Bangladesh, the alienation is built around ‘illegal infiltration’. The SIR here is tied to its unique history of Partition, which unfolded differently from Punjab, says scholar Anwesha Sengupta. The overlapping waves of migration across porous borders – for food, work, survival, and a shared language and culture – was the norm rather than the exception. But this free mobility has now been problematised and its official face is the SIR exercise.

Across villages, rumours circulate via social media and whisper networks that those marked for deletion would be taken to detention camps. Across Murshidabad, women fear whether loss of voting rights might also mean losing access to women centric schemes such as Lakshmir Bhandar, Kanyashree, and Swasthya Sathi, even though there is no official directive from the state government.

On the streets of Samsherganj, a volatile area under the watch of state police and BSF security personnel, Rozina Bibi, whose documents were flagged for PAN mismatch despite voting for years, asked: “Will I now lose access to government schemes? Ration? My citizenship?”

The loss of benefits seems less damaging than the loss of citizenship, some women said, because it is the end of many more privileges. “If voting rights go, then other rights also go: land rights, school admissions, medical treatment, access to schemes,” said Farhana.

Read our story here.

Though it has had three consecutive terms under a woman Chief Minister and her party, the Trinamool Congress has the highest proportion (38% of their total MPS) of women MPs, in the state’s legislative structures, gender representation remains far from equitable. Not only do women constitute only 13.7% of the total MLAs, but even among the women who do hold positions, the majority are from general caste backgrounds. Those from Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Muslim communities remain inadequately represented in positions of influence.

Read our analysis here.

This week, we begin our three-part series on how caste identities shape ASHA workers’ access to opportunities, safety, support, and dignity. The effort is to decenter caste privilege and reframe the history of the programme through the lens of marginalised ASHA workers’ experiences, document systemic exclusions and build grassroots evidence of how caste discrimination is embedded within and outside the healthcare structures for ASHA workers.

As the first ASHA facilitator from a Scheduled Caste community in her village, Dharmishtha Chauhan has had to fight discrimination based on caste as well as her disability, affecting her mental health and curbing professional mobility. Caste bias, she tells Sarasvati Thuppadolla, still remains missing from union concerns, and encourages marginalised ASHA workers to free themselves of fear.

The cruelties were small but obvious – on field visits people would offer water from afar. At work, colleagues would not share her lunch box, make sly references to her caste and make sure she visited SC homes.

“As a facilitator, ASHA workers from the SC category often come to me with concerns. They say when they go for field work in upper-caste communities, residents don’t co-operate or respond to them properly. There have also been instances where SC ASHA workers faced harassment in the form of false complaints from residents,” she said.

Dharmishtha has worked to give a voice to ASHA workers who are Dalits, exhorting them to stand up and complain about discrimination and abuse. “I have seen ASHA workers from our community staying quiet, because they are ultimately seeking some acceptance or individual advantages. But I have spoken against such casteism even if it meant they never interact with me ever. And secondly, we should show people who we are, and make them aware that untouchability can be subject to the Atrocity Act,” she said.

Read our interview here.

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Killer Heat: Vulnerable workers across the country have been hit by an early heatwave. In Odisha, two school teachers on survey duty for census died in separate incidents in Mayurbhanj and Sundargarh districts, likely of heatstroke. It is also likely that the Noida unrest was triggered at least in part by the extreme discomfort suffered by workers who work and live with little protection against the suffocating heat that swamped NCR earlier this week. We had reported on how women workers in the garment factories of India’s textile belt deal with several health issues in summer months for want of any heat planning by owners. And the Indian Federation of App Based Transport Workers has sought heatwave protection for gig and platform workers.

Temple Row: “For centuries, certain things like customs and practices have crystallised and become an essential practice. You can’t forget history,” the Supreme Court told Indira Jaising, who is appearing for two women who challenged the ban on the entry of female devotees aged between 10 and 50 years into the Sabarimala shrine. The nine-judge constitution bench said that judicial intervention in purely religious practices could lead to the “annihilation” of a religion and result in “dangerous situations”.

Hai, Hai: Delhi’s women’s colleges have a reputation for pushing back against bullies. Decades of dealing with hoodlums scaling their walls, molesters stalking them in the campus and miscreants forcing their way into their college festivals have given them low tolerance for bad behaviour. When ABVP honchos forced their way into Gargi College recently, hundreds of girls rounded up on them, heckled them and literally marched them to the gate. All this while the police watched haplessly. And then there were the students of Lady Shri Ram College who put up a loud protest against having their principal in a video openly backing the BJP’s women’s reservation bill. They pointed to how “explicitly political” this was in a college with the stated commitment to being “apolitical”.

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Doyenne and Dissenter: The grand historian of ancient Indian history is 94 and continues her indefatigable mission to not just write good history but also the way it must be taught in schools. Since her magnum opus Asoka and the Decline of Mauryas, her work spanning 60 years and two dozen volumes on dynasties, kinship, caste structures, paint a compelling portrait of the early history of India- and the subcontinent. This beautiful profile of Romila Thapar by Raghu Karnad will sort you out for the weekend.

Hollow Body: If you’re feeling worn down by the speed and surface-level thinking of the AI era, here is a powerful meditation on attention, craft, and meaning. Through learning classical guitar, Peter Wayne Moe explores slow mastery as an antidote to despair and intellectual shortcuts.

Killer Fashion: The devil loves wearing red satin pumps and cashmere pullovers (preferably cerulean), but at what cost? Fashion has a fatal past and a frightening present — think silhouette-cinching corsets, flammable flannels, factory accidents — that imperil the lives of its makers and consumers. Listen to scholar Alison Matthews David discuss these in a Rest Is History podcast from 2022.

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Our weekly newsletter brings you our top stories, gender news from the world, and our team’s reading recommendations.

Hello and welcome to BehanVox! At 92%, West Bengal logged the highest ever voter turnout this week in the first phase of its assembly election. And Tamil Nadu also voted a record 85%. This could mean, analysts say, either – a massive mandate against the incumbent leadership or a forceful show of support for it. Does it mean overwhelming dismay with the Mamata government or fury at the disruptive SIR exercise? A shock win for Vijay or a vote for conventional Dravidian politics? There is only one outcome that can be guaranteed – there will be no hung house in these elections.

That women remained at the centre of the electoral slugfest this month is telling. If it was not the BJP’s promise of a new cash transfer to women in West Bengal it was the possibility of an increase in an old scheme in Tamil Nadu and Bengal. And when it was neither, it was the furore over the Women’s Reservation Bill being linked to the delimitation exercise bang in the middle of the poll season. We could be cynical about the manipulative nature of it all but we think that it is that political parties are – even in their hamhanded, often misguided and patriarchal way – putting women at the centre of their poll plans. Not all of the women-centric election news was great – as we reported women and the queer community were disproportionately impacted by the SIR exercise in West Bengal, the most stringent anywhere in India so far.

This week we bring you an extensive analysis of what a cash transfer scheme that acknowledges carework means to different women and different schools of economic thought.

A sum of Rs 1,000, no strings attached, dropping into their spare bank account every month can mean different things to different women grappling with financial distress every single day.

Valarmathi, a domestic worker in Tiruvannamalai, is the only reliable earner in her family. Her husband is an alcoholic so Rs 10,000 she earns working three homes is spent entirely on running her home and feeding her family of five, three of them small children. So, the Rs 1000, she says, offers her the little buffer that helps her family “survive another day”.

In Viji’s home in Semmancherry in Chennai, the Rs 1000 seems to disappear even before it is credited. She and her family of four have been struggling to get through the day ever since her husband armtwisted her to leave her nursing job. The family needs at least a bag and a half of 25-kg rice at Rs 1900.

In Chengalpattu, Rekha and her sisters said the Rs 1,000 helps with their mother’s treatment of an injury incurred at work. The extra money gives them a small but necessary cushion. In a village near Thoothukudi, it allows Muthammal, 34, to pay her debt collector because it arrives promptly by 8 am on the 15th of every month.

Tamil Nadu’s KMUT, makes for an interesting case study for unconditional cash transfers to women, an idea that has caught on widely in India over the last few years and especially in the months and days leading up to elections. For one, it positions the money as urimai, a right and not a dole as other such schemes across India do. This links to the self respect movement that underlined the early Dravidian movement. It is also the first and only transfer aimed at partially recompensing women for carework.

It also sparks many debates, grounded in feminism, development economics and of course politics. That it should not give the state government the clutch to take their feet off the pedal on development. That it bolsters the idea of only women being responsible for carework or of not encouraging them to take on paid work. And that it is nowhere close to paying for what carework delivers.

Prabha Kotiswaran, professor of law at Kings College London (KCL), however, views these transfers as a pragmatic redistributive measure within existing inequalities and constraints of hetero-patriarchal marriage – such as limited inheritance rights and lack of access to marital property – that can recognise unpaid work, strengthen women’s bargaining power within households, and enable greater control over their time and labour.

Varna Sri Raman and Aishwarya Govindarajan examine in a deeply argued article in the backdrop of the state elections in Tamil Nadu.

Read the story here.

‘Illegal’ Crackdown: The crackdown against workers who protested their work and wage conditions in Noida on April 13 was “illegal” and “extrajudicial”, it has been alleged by activists and advocates. They maintained that those arrested have been denied their legal rights and lawyers who went to meet them were also detained. After the protest, the police apprehended over 350 workers, and alleged that “external elements” instigated the campaign through social media and provoked violence. The police also alleged that the protestors had links with “political parties and even had links with Pakistan”.

Women Casualties Most: Of the 25 killed in the explosion while they were handling explosive material at a firecracker factory in Virudhunagar in Tamil Nadu 22 were women. The factory was supposed to be closed but about 50 workers were inside at the time, officials said. An analysis points out that small-sector hazardous industries tend to employ women and children at paltry pay and no cover for the risk they undertake. It is also reported that the workers were sitting too close to each other as they handled the explosive material. This despite the safety measures that are supposed to be in place given the history of such disasters in this sector. We had reported on the material conditions of women workers in factories here during the last elections in the state.

Sports Snafu: Pakistan’s women’s football team will not be participating in the South Asian women’s football tournament hosted in Goa between May 25 and June 7. The team was not given clearance to travel due to the tensions between the two countries, Pakistani football officials told Al Jazeera. This is not the first time that sporting events between India and Pakistan have been hit. Cricket has been particularly impacted hard, as also hockey.

Room To Write: In the face of strident backlash against feminism especially from younger men, South Korea’s women are engaging more enthusiastically than ever before with literature. BBC reports that this year Korean women swept all the six categories in the country’s most prestigious literary prize - the Yi Sang Awards. “Book talks, and reading and writing rooms called guelbang, have sprung up, offering time and space for women to gather and - crucially, they emphasise - grow as a community,” the report says.

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Vijay and Cinema Stardom in Tamil Nadu: A superstar, a duopoly, and a formidable challenge to the old political guard. What can come next? Actor Vijay is the latest figure in Tamil Nadu’s cinema-politics nexus, intent on translating his cinematic fame into a durable political machinery. But stardom might not be enough to flip the script, writes scholar Vignesh Karthik KR in Himal.

Censusnama: If you’re wondering how India plans to count 1.4 billion people – their migration, lifestyles, languages, castes – there’s no better place to start than the past. This splendid archive chronicles censusmaking from medieval periods and Mughal empire to colonial India. Look closely and one may find traces and makings of modern India.

Get a Hobby: As glorious and self-fulfilling it is to have a hobby, the idea itself is riddled with histories of capital, gender, and power. Why do hobbies become jobs, what does capitalism have to do with it, how do women find pastimes, and the ultimate conundrum: are hobbies a capitalist byproduct or the utopia one needs to find oneself? Tune into Novara FM’s history (and if you’re still bored, their companion piece on boredom).

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Our weekly newsletter brings you our top stories, gender news from the world, and our team’s reading recommendations.

Hello and welcome to BehanVox!

After the staggering chaos of an exceptionally stringent and exclusionary SIR exercise, the deletion of voter names in millions, and the useless promise of adjudication that will not help the disenfranchised this election, West Bengal finally goes to vote the next week. As does Tamil Nadu where superstar and potential disruptor Vijay makes his political debut amidst extreme – both a sweeping triumph as well as a total wipeout. At the Feminist Election Newsroom, we pulled together striking data painstakingly pulled together by the research body, SABAR institute, to estimate how disproportionately women from marginalised communities lost out the right to vote in the roll revision. We wrote on how transgender voters struggled to deal with the SIR and had to make do with dead names and gender. We also marked the Dalit History Month with a tender yet powerful love story on what resistance means in romance.

Elections these days are also exercises in competitive cash transfer announcements for women. In Tamil Nadu, they have been framed as Urimai- or right. How do we make sense of these Universal Cash Transfer schemes, unpaid care and what good policy design must look like? These are questions we will be taking to Dr Prabha Kotiswaran and Dr Varna Sriraman, who have worked on these themes across states. Sign up for our FEN and get exclusive (free) access to this webinar.

Early this week, the Supreme Court remarked that the SIR in West Bengal deviated from the procedure it adopted in other states by inserting a new category for scrutiny – “logical discrepancy”. These could refer to a mismatch in parents’ names, low age gap with parents and the number of children of the parents being more than six. Having said that however the court dismissed the petitions of those excluded who had appealed to special tribunals. This means that it is a certainty that those who have sought adjudication -- around 34 lakh -- will not be able to vote this time.

This particularly bruising revision exercise has left women voters more deeply impacted than men, found an exclusive investigative story in which BehanBox collaborated with the Kolkata-based Sabar Institute, which is focussed on evidence-based research aimed at inclusion. The numbers the researchers estimated are shocking – almost 61.8% of voters who were deleted (or under adjudication) from West Bengal’s electoral rolls after the SIR are women.

As many as 61,93,386 eligible women voters will not be able to vote in the upcoming state assembly elections. It is telling that the deletions are heavily concentrated in constituencies that have large populations of marginalised communities, including Muslims, Scheduled Tribes and Matuas. Women make up more than half of the deleted voters in over 88% constituencies. The deletions, the data show, are heavily concentrated among women in constituencies with large populations of marginalised communities, including Muslims, Scheduled Tribes, and Matuas.

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It demonstrates that an exercise like the SIR, which relies on the presentation of documents and legacy linkage, disproportionately affects women, as was the case in Bihar. The only constituencies where women were less affected than men were urban ones like Kolkata. In absolute terms, Murshidabad and Malda —both Muslim-majority districts—recorded the top 10 constituencies with the highest numbers of women voters removed.

The primary cause for deletion of women voters, according to ECI’s disclosure, was that they ‘permanently shifted’ – likely due to marriage. Marriage, as per Census 2011 data, was the most important reason for migration of women. A process like SIR that asks a female voter who is already marginalised — who does not own land, and often lacks educational or formal documents — to produce proof they simply do not have, takes away the one document that establishes identity and political power: a voter card.

Read our story here.

The election process was never an easy one for the trans-queer community. Gender identity, name, permanent address, constituency – these are all problematic issues that add a certain precarity to their very citizenship. BehanBox has reported extensively on how queer persons are forced to leave home early to escape abuse and harassment at the hands of families and neighbourhoods; how they struggle to find stable housing in the face of hostility even as they are deprived of their familial inheritance of property and how red tape and official apathy make it hard for them to secure transgender identity cards.

And then the SIR arrived. All the factors that seemed challenging earlier, now seem insurmountable. Stuti Gupta reports for Behanbox from West Bengal on how hard it has been for them to re-establish connections with their families to procure documents, return to their old neighbourhoods to visit BLOs and ensure that their current names and genders are reflected in the electoral rolls.

For Rahul, a trans man who works at a cafe in Kolkata, the idea of returning to the Hooghly neighbourhood that he fled is inconceivable. It not only brings back painful memories of the hostility he faced but also poses a risk to his physical safety. “Okhaane gele ora maar-dhaar korte paare [if I go there, they could beat me up],” he said.

When he explained his situation to the BLO, the response was apathetic: “Na aashte to hobe hi [there is no choice, you must come].” It was eventually decided that Rahul would meet the BLO at the latter’s home, not office. This never happened but Rahul did find his name on the voter list from a constituency he had left long ago, with a dead name, dead identity and a face that may not look the same as it does on his old photo. Will he actually get to vote? There is no certainty.

Read our story here.

Zubaan, the feminist publishing house, has been generously sharing their fabulous books list with BehanBox, allowing us to publish extracts from works on themes that are deeply meaningful for us. This week we mark the Dalit History Month with a story excerpted from their recent book, Love in the Time of Caste: A Dalit-feminist anthology of love stories, edited, translated and with an introduction by Nikhil Pandhi. Love, Pandhi says in the introduction to the book, can and must bloom under conditions of acute debility and duress.

Love should be a radical tool of rebellion against caste, NT-DNT activist Deepa Pawar had argued in a fabulous essay for BehanBox. It is also the line that runs through Mhow, a delicately told story from the book, written by Kailash Wankhede. It talks of the radical possibilities of solidarity and consciousness in intercaste unions.

Read the excerpt here.

Protest Bloc: The Lok Sabha, on April 17, rejected the constitutional amendment bill to increase the strength to 850 to “operationalise” 33% reservation for women. The Opposition parties voted against it, declaring that while they support women’s reservation, the government’s bid to link this to delimitation is disingenuous. The constitutional amendment bill was a “smoke screen” that would have given the government arbitrary powers to manipulate future electoral outcomes, said Maadhyam founder Maansi Verma to BehanBox in an interview with us. The fear is that delimitation will result in significant changes to parliamentary arithmetics, representation based on population and centre-state relations. India has redrawn parliamentary seats thrice based on the censuses in 1951, 1961 and 1971. Thereafter, the exercise was halted for fear of imbalance in the representation because the southern states were steadily moving towards declining birth rates.

Protest and Punishment: Unrest festers in Noida and Haryana’s industrial belts as hundreds of contractual factory workers protest for higher wages, social protection, and working conditions. Earning between Rs 10,000-15,000 a month, workers say wages have remained unchanged for years even as a cost of living crisis and ongoing war exacerbates their distress. The Hindu noted that in Uttar Pradesh, around 67.8% of regular workers had no written contract and 59.2% lacked access to social support — effectively working as informal labour despite being employed in formal establishments. Workers in both UP and Haryana have rejected the proposed’ “insufficient” wage hike. In the last week hundreds have been detained, arrested, and beaten. Women domestic workers and gig workers in Noida, employed in similar precarious conditions, recently joined their factory counterparts in asking for dignified wages and safe workspaces.

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Orban Out: Strongman Viktor Orban, who ruled Hungary for 16 years with an iron hand, was defeated this week in parliamentary elections by a huge margin by Peter Magyar, once his loyalist. It was a shock defeat for the man who had become the icon for rightwing politicians across the world, including the US where he enjoys huge support among conservative groups and the Trump administration. Magyar has promised to revive Hungary’s stagnant economy, deal with the rampant corruption of the Orban regime and improve relations with the EU. However, to the chagrin of the country’s queer community he has remained silent on the restoration of their rights which had been severely curtailed by the outgoing government. He did in a carefully worded statement, decry Orban government’s attempt to “instill fear and divide us”.

Lots In A Name: Shrilal Shukla would have gone to town on this in Raag Darbari, the superlative satire on Indian politics: the Rajasthan government in its wisdom has decided that names like “Sheru” and “Shaitan” will be replaced under a Sarthak Naam Abhiyan or a meaningful name campaign. The education department has identified around 2,000-3,000 such names across government and private schools and will offer parents nearly 3,000 “meaningful” alternatives. Its argument is that children with names like these grow up with a lifelong complex. Navbharat Times, however, reports that among the names the government considers meaningful for girls are Bhayankar, Bhiksha, and Kaljugi.

The Age of Dinosaurs: ‘But we also visit museums to bend time and distance, to shuck off the weight of perspective, however briefly.’ Read Elena Megalos’ beautiful essay on parenting, time and perspective.

Diary from Lebanon: A month since the war began in West Asia, and it has pushed the people from the region to their physical and psychological limits. Justin Salhani’s diary captures this from Lebanon.

America’s Limits, Iran’s Leverage and Pakistan’s Moment: How did Pakistan get US and Iran to talk? In this episode of the Mishal Hussain show, Maleeha Lodhi, the former Pakistan ambassador to the US explains.

Want to explore more newsletters? In Postcards, we send you missives on the places, people and ideas that brought Team BehanBox joy. Our monthly offering Postscript invites you, the reader, into our newsroom to understand how the stories you read came to be – from ideation to execution. Subscribe for more.

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Our weekly newsletter brings you our top stories, gender news from the world, and our team’s reading recommendations.

Hello Behans!

We usually do not crowd our calendar because we like the idea that our readers take time to savour and think through our stories. But this week, there was no way we could ignore the many feverish developments that needed the BehanBox lens – three state assembly elections, political manifestos and questions of women’s participation and of course, the furore over the Life of Pujaa debate which has spawned many smaller skirmishes on the side. It meant hectic days of work for our small team of six but we put together some sharp analyses and a fabulous essay for you.

Also: census is happening (at last), and it’s going digital. The official portal is open for phase 1, people can submit their details online before an official house enumerator visits in person. Check out the full schedule and our primer on how to do this!

Our Feminist Election Newsroom published analyses of the manifestos for Keralam and Assam, both high-octane elections. In Assam, predictably and evidently, the discourse is mainly spinning around questions of identity and religion. The incumbent NDA government’s priority, it has time and again stated, is to expedite detection and pushback of ‘‘illegal immigrants’’ to “protect the land and dignity” of indigenous people and provide land rights to “genuine citizens”. Other issues that parties are focusing on include youth unemployment, flood mitigation, recognition and welfare of tribal communities, women-centred cash schemes. And the collective grieving over star singer Zubeen Garg’s untimely death has found place in all manifestos – from justice to cultural centres and film city named after him.

In Keralam, where the BJP has mounted a vociferous campaign to widen its base, the incumbent left and Congress-led centrists are debating a number of issues – among these are health, employment, agriculture, and women’s empowerment.

Another subject that has become a fractious poll point is the rehabilitation of the survivors of the catastrophic landslide two years ago in Wayanad, Rahul Gandhi’s former constituency and a Congress bastion. The state Congress said this week that it had mobilised Rs 5.38 crore for rehabilitation works and that all transactions were transparent and that the various allegations of the CPI (M) in this regard were unfounded.

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But we focus this week on a story from Wayanad that is neither about the state government, the Congress or the NDA. Because all of them failed to resolve the financial crisis the region’s women faced in the wake of the disaster – massive loan burdens. It took a women’s collective spanning three of the worst affected wards to persuade the Kerala high court and subsequently the state government to provide them loan waivers.

In a deeply reported story on this collective, Liniya Babu explains how the disaster never really ended that terrible monsoon night when entire villages were buried under mud. Most women there had internal and bank-linked loans facilitated by the neighbourhood groups of Kudumbashree, the state’s acclaimed employment and empowerment network. Offered at small interest rates these loans fund almost every aspect of their lives from cattle rearing to personal consumption. The women’s homes, businesses and savings had been washed away, but worse, they were left with no assets or jobs to repay the loans. As Wayanad limps back to normalcy, the women are asking for total loan waivers which they have been partially granted. All this while the Centre excused itself from any intervention and the state pleaded helplessness.

Read our story here.

What happens when a woman from a village or small town in India who draws attention online for her effort, inspiration or charm starts to show increased fluency, support, ambition, and self-possession? The fascination then turns to suspicion if not outright hostility of the kind that influencers from big cities rarely deal with.

It happened with Pujarini Pradhan, an influencer from rural Midnapore who posts in unapologetically accented English from the kitchen of her small home on an array of subjects. “Here was a woman speaking about books, films, feminism and ordinary struggles with a composure that felt lived-in and unapologetic. And just like that, the conversation moved from listening to measuring — from hearing what she said to testing whether someone like her could possibly say it. The voice, the polish, the pace of her success — everything was folded into a quiet plausibility test. It happens with such ease that it chills,” says Prerna Subramanian in a wonderfully argued essay for BehanBox. An Assistant Professor at the OP Jindal Global University and a Fellow at the Center for Women’s Studies, JGU, Prerna writes and talks incisively about popular culture.

This backlash against Puja – and others like her – raises questions around the platform culture. But the most important of these is this – why is it hard to reconcile the possibility that the kitchen can carry labour, repetition, time, and care but it can also carry thought? Why do we find it so hard to let a woman sound completely at home in her own mind?

Read the essay here.

Massive SIR Deletions: Over 90 lakh names, or 11.85% of the pre-SIR Bengal electorate, have been deleted from the electoral rolls, The Telegraph reports. In seven districts that have considerable Muslim presence, 17,10,764 names have been deleted following adjudication. North 24-Parganas and Nadia which hold substantial Matua (scheduled caste migrants from Bangladesh), too have seen massive deletions, leading to allegations of discrimination.

Reservation Bills: In a special parliament session starting April 16, the government will introduce draft bills for amendments to women’s reservation laws. This will make way for the implementation of the 33% reservation for women in the Parliament from 2029. It will increase the number of seats from 543 to 816 with 273 seats reserved for women. But this requires the delimitation exercise to be completed on the basis of the 2027 census, as the opposition has pointed out.

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Electoral Patriarchy: In the US, where the discourse in the ultraconservative quarters is increasingly sounding like something out of The Handmaiden’s Tale, the latest buzz is that women should give up their right to vote, reports the New York Times. The household vote should be entirely ceded to the husband, this lot says, and unmarried women should ideally be represented by fathers, brothers and uncles. The problems, they say, are two fold – one women’s suffrage “divides” families and two, that women’s “natural tenderness” would make them susceptible, heaven forbid, to supporting liberal policies.

Mano In Africa: Guardian reports that manosphere, having taken wings in Europe and the US, is now spreading fast across Africa. “The ideas that shape the manosphere are linked to those of men’s rights organisations like Maendeleo ya Wanaume. Its big argument was that men and boys were being left behind as a result of all of the investments that had been made around girls’ and women’s rights,” says Awino Okech, a professor of feminist and security studies at Soas University of London. The conversations in this sphere are standardly and uniformly nauseating.

Anti Auntie: There was a time when being called “auntie” was considered ageist, lookist and sexist. Then auntie-hood was reclaimed because it represents the woman who doesn’t care how she looked or what she wore and most importantly, spoke her mind bluntly. Last week, however, an employment tribunal in the UK ruled in favour of NHS worker Ilda Esteves who alleged that she was subjected to harassment from coworker Charles Oppong who repeatedly called her “auntie”. He claimed it was a term of respect but she countered that she asked him to stop but he did not. He also apparently suggested that an older colleague would be a “good match” for her.

The Invisible Lives of Carers: It is ultimately a problem we will have to confront with–caregiving. Yet, states are thinking so little about it. Through this deeply personal account, Minreet Kaur lays bare the invisible lives of caregivers and the structures that are not equal to the burden of caregiving.

It was Never About The AI: Is AI the problem? Every generation has faced a version of the moment, argues Eric Markowitz. It is not just the AI but a mirroring of a society that treats human value as expendable, he says. Do read this article and let us know what you think of it.

The Disappearance of Lilac Tiger: This week, our visual journalist, Urvi Sawant, has a podcast recommendation. A five-part story, set in the city of Nice, it is about memory, love, loneliness, shady millionaires, an eccentric old lady with a farty dog... and the disappearance of the Lilac Tiger.

Want to explore more newsletters? In Postcards, we send you missives on the places, people and ideas that brought Team BehanBox joy. Our monthly offering Postscript invites you, the reader, into our newsroom to understand how the stories you read came to be – from ideation to execution. Subscribe for more.

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Our weekly newsletter brings you our top stories, gender news from the world, and our team’s reading recommendations.

Hello Behans!

A popular meme doing the rounds is how this insufferably long March simply refuses to end, from war to heat wave to rain to floods to LPG shortage it brought us a fine selection of miseries. Well, April is finally here and it brings another high-voltage drama into our lives – the Assembly Elections. Next Thursday, Kerala, Assam and Puducherry will vote, April 23 Tamil Nadu goes to polls, and April 23 and 29, West Bengal will pick a party. Every election now is high-decibel but Kerala, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal are particularly with speculation around how the non-BJP incumbents will fare, if and how much of the dent the ruling party can make there and opacity around exactly who is backing whom. At the centre of it all, is the very idea of citizenship, what with the SIR process.

At BehanBox, we believe that election journalism needs to go beyond party politics, conspiracy theories, recriminations and backroom reporting. So starting this week, our Feminist Election Newsroom (FEN) goes into high gear. What is FEN you ask? It is our collective practice of democracy as it should be. You can read more about it here.

At FEN, we assert the voices of women and gender diverse persons, as people who exist at many intersections of class, caste, gender, religion, region, disability and many more. We do that by seeking accountability from our political representatives. We also do this by making our issues central to political decision making. Our idea is to cut the noise and uncover the truth so you can make sense of seemingly complex issues and make informed choices.

During 2024 General Elections, we brought you lucid explainers – Mera First Vote to Suno Behan – and collaborated with our readers and network of journalists to transform election coverage. Two years and over 400 members later FEN now is a year-round practice for us as we track Parliament sessions, budgets, and policies. Do join this dynamic space by click of a button here.

Kenyan activist Joan Kinyua was a fan of digital technology and unhappy with her job as a business administrator when a new job came her way. She was not very sure what data annotating entailed but it was tech-centric and intriguing enough to pull her in. The work was wildly varied and did not appear to target a single product or company – street images for self-driving cars one day and photos of homes taken by robot vacuums another; then there were the images of extreme violence and dead bodies.

Then some facts began sinking in – the salary was poor, the workload was unpredictable and often disturbing and there was nothing like a career plan in evidence. When she started speaking up against the work conditions, she was warned of dire consequences, given poor ratings and threatened with isolation. Slowly the idea of unionising took root through a research project where people in the field spoke up about challenges – of poor or no skilling avenues, of mental health issues, of a job market so skewed it left workers with little bargaining power.

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Along with a friend Michael Geoffrey Asia, she set up the Data Labellers Association. It was a space where these challenges would be recognised and articulated by workers. It was also very hard work because the collectivising could not be at the cost of the job. “Most people did not know what data labeling is – we had to establish its definition and how important it is in the Artificial Intelligence field. We took it upon ourselves to define these roles. And we took it upon ourselves to speak about how people are being treated, to name and shame these organisations,” says Joan.

What lessons does the association’s work hold for a rising data work centre like India? What should the shape of solidarity be? What can it bring at a time when unemployment is rampant? What is the place of race in data work? Saumya Kalia spoke to Joan and Michael for answers to these and many other questions in the latest edition of BehanBox Talkies.

Read our interview here.

The interview is the latest in our journalistic campaign to bring to light the many opacities that hide the world of digital labour. We have reported on how India’s AI boom runs on women’s unpaid care and cognitive labour and how the dispersed nature of their work, and how opaque AI supply chains and deficient policy have invisibilised millions of digital gig workers in India.

Trans Law: With the President’s assent, the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill, 2026 became law this week. This was despite some concerted political opposition to it asking for select committee scrutiny for its impact on transgender persons. And despite, a massive uproar among the transgender community, lawyer and civil society organisations. As Mridula Chari had argued in her fine piece for BehanBox, this law erases the entire trans community and the supportive embrace of its solidarity for the vulnerable.

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WB And Its SIR-led Gender Skew: Election Commission data show that the number of female electors registered to vote in West Bengal has dropped to its lowest in 10 years, and the gender ratio fell for the first time in 13 years following the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in the state, reports Indian Express. An analysis of the EC’s gender data indicates that the gender ratio in West Bengal is the lowest it has been in five years, the report adds. Women’s votes are integral for the two parties who have the most to lose in this electoral fight – the TMC and the BJP.

Assam And Women Candidates: EC data shows that there are fewer women candidates in the fray in the forthcoming Assam assembly elections, reports The Hindu. Women make for 8.17% of the 722 candidates in the fray which may seem marginally higher than the 8.03% fielded in 2021, but the absolute numbers were then higher —76 women out of 946 candidates.

Kidnapped: Shelly Kittleson, a freelance journalist who has covered conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, was kidnapped this week in Baghdad. One of the suspects detained has links to an Iranian-aligned militia group, Kataib Hezbollah, which was said to be plotting to kidnap or kill female journalists, reports BBC. A source added that the journalist had been warned of the risk.

Istanbul Descent Into Darkness: Years of political repression and creeping urban decay have hollowed out the city’s soul, designing dissent out of its once-vibrant streets and erasing its rich cosmopolitan past from popular memory writes Hannah Lucinda Smith.

ChatGPT Dads: ‘When Sam Altman said he “cannot imagine figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT,” it awakened an anger deep inside me that only internet bros can inspire. So I did what I do when I get angry and wrote a comic about it! Read on to hear all about the downsides of fathers outsourcing the mental work of parenting to AI. (Barf.)’... This is Aubrey Hirsch doodling her angst out. Do check out this comic. At BehanBox, we love comics.

Portraits of a Population: Finally, India has put the wheels in motion for the Census to begin. As we get ourselves counted in, here is a fascinating archive of hand drawn graphs, illustrations and other visuals from the census department over the years documented by Aman Bhargava and Vivek Matthew with illustrations by Aditi Ankush. At BehanBox, we love archives too.

Want to explore more newsletters? In Postcards, we send you missives on the places, people and ideas that brought Team BehanBox joy. Our monthly offering Postscript invites you, the reader, into our newsroom to understand how the stories you read came to be – from ideation to execution. Subscribe for more.

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Our weekly newsletter brings you our top stories, gender news from the world, and our team’s reading recommendations.

Hello Behans!

In our interconnected world, the global turmoil is now being mirrored in many pockets of India, show scattered reports.

Peeyur Timbers once used to give away firewood for free to clear its yards in Chittur, Ernakulam. But now the proprietor told New Indian Express, people are willing to pay a hefty price for it. Two tonnes of wood, normally bought only by bakeries and mills, sold out in three days to ordinary customers. Similar stories of soaring demand for firewood are being reported from across the country, indicating that decades of effort to switch the use of unsustainable and toxic traditional fuel sources in Indian kitchens is being undone

With all talk around resolution of the West Asia conflict moving one step forward and two steps back, it is difficult to summon any optimism around the energy crisis. The Indian manufacturing sector is beginning to show the signs of the strain brought by surging freight rates, stuck shipments and gas shortages, reports Indian Express. Steel, textiles, automobile, and food businesses have been hit, leading also to reverse migration. With the critical livelihood scheme – which held up the return of workers during Covid – now imperilled, it remains to be seen how the returnees will cope.

We ought to keep persisting despite everything. Our friends at Locavore are doing just that. As part of their women farmer project — a multimedia storytelling initiative that documents and amplifies the lived experiences, knowledge systems, and everyday labour of women farmers across India’s food landscape — they are inviting applications for fellowships for women storytellers. Do check out and apply.

This week in BehanBox, we report on another geopolitical issue that has left women workers in a precarious state. And an interview with an Asha worker from Kashmir whose mission and faith keep her going despite everything.

Ponds filled to the brim, lush coconut trees, and aqua farms extending to the horizon — every scenery in West Godavari’s Bhimavaram evokes prosperity. But not Durga’s 280 sq-ft home in Akividu, where the living room becomes the bedroom at night.

Durga is one of the many women employed in the shrimp factories of Bhimavaram, a critical hub for shrimp exports to the US. Here in processing and cold storage units, big and small, women like her spend hours in freezing rooms, deveining and deheading prawns that are then frozen, raw or cooked, for shipment. Andhra Pradesh contributes 80% of India’s shrimp exports and supports the livelihoods of over 2.5 lakh families, like Durga’s, and sustains nearly 3 million people directly and indirectly.

The Trump administration’s hefty tariff rate on exports out of India, including shrimp, have hit the industry hard. And despite partial rollback, the sector still cannot compete with other exporters such as Ecuador.

“In the past six months, I haven’t been getting work throughout the month and I earn only half of what I used to,” says Radha, another worker whose monthly earning of Rs 15,000 has now halved. “I have to educate my eight-year-old daughter, repay loans, and manage household expenses. My husband hits me when I ask him to pitch in.”

Radha’s earnings and work used to allow her independence and time away from home. Now she has no option but to be vulnerable to the abuse at the hands of an alchoholic husband.

Even before the current crisis, the industry was exploitative. Most workers are hired on a contractual basis so employers do not have to pay them a fixed salary and also avoid paying benefits such as health insurance, bonus, and provident fund. Although contractual workers are technically eligible for benefits such as health insurance, bonus, and provident fund, these are rarely provided in practice.

New labour laws allowed employers to demand that workers put in 8-10 work hours a day for the same pay. Now the industry slump caused by the tariff is allowing them to seek even longer hours of work or face the threat of dismissal, say workers, sometimes as much as 12 hours.

Read our story here.

In Shaheena Bano’s life there is little room or time for bitterness or recriminations. This is despite the fact that the 42-year-old ASHA worker from Srinagar is, like others of her cadre, hugely underpaid and overworked. Apart from the unending tasks she is entrusted with, she also has to navigate political uncertainties, curbs on her mobility, public apathy, and a health department that does not dignify her work.

She works on some very basic tenets – her work is a form of long term charity that her faith values, sadaqah-e-jariya and that she and her coworkers should neither trample upon the rights of others nor stand by when others oppress them in their line of work.

“We are expected to work as full-time employees and are treated like volunteers,” she says.” There have been weeks when we have even worked on weekends. The health department is completely unaware of the scope of our work. I’ve been to the mission director, the CMO, the BMO. They expect us to be everywhere. If there is contaminated water somewhere, they put the blame on us and say, “ASHA kahan hai?” How can we be responsible for everything? Hum sipahi ki tarah humesha field mai rehte hain (we are like soldiers; always stationed in the field).”

When recently protests against the Iran war broke out in the valley, Shaheena Bano had helped transport a pregnant woman to the hospital through the melee on the streets. She is proud of her effort and what it brought to the life of an anxious family. And her work has helped put her two children through a great education, build her home and assist her husband’s catering business.

“We are our own saviours. I have often organised protests and participated in ones which are organised by our union. I always ask my fellow ASHAs to not fear the authorities,” she says.

Read our interview here.

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Trans Bill: Despite the vociferous opposition to it, The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill, 2026 (Bill No. 79 of 2026), has been passed by the Parliament and now awaits the Presidential stamp. The Bill makes a critical change to the 2019 Act, limiting the definition of “transgender person” to socio-cultural identities such as kinnar, hijra, aravani, jogta, eunuch, or biologically-defined intersex variations, or persons forcibly compelled into such an identity through mutilation, castration, amputation, or any surgical, chemical or hormonal procedure. This excludes those with alternative sexual orientations and gender fluid identities, doing away with the right to self-perceived gender identity. Mridula Chari had argued that this erases the very existence of an entire community. The campaign against the Bill had included not just the LGBTQ+ communities and street protests by progressive Indians but also political parties and leaders.

Women’s Seat Reservation: In the ongoing Parliament session, the government is seeking to introduce at least two bills - including constitutional amendments - over two special sessions towards reservation of one third seats for women in the next Lok Sabha poll and ensuing assembly elections. The number of seats in the Lok Sabha will at the end of this exercise rise by 50% with the increased seats being kept aside for women, Times of India reports. The Congress has criticised the move because it is being considered without the completion of the delimitation and census exercises. DMK MP Kanimozhi too has questioned the timing and haste behind the move.

Kerala Skew: Between the Left, the Congress, the BJP and the IUML Kerala’s main political parties have fielded only around 40 women candidates across its 140 constituencies. It is the first time the IUML has offered tickets to women candidates. Since the formation of the Kerala Assembly in 1957, this percentage has never crossed 10%.

Gender in Sports: The International Olympic Committee is reportedly planning to ​introduce universal genetic sex testing for women athletes and impose a ban on transgender and intersex competitors, reports Reuters. Over 80 human rights and sport advocacy groups have protested on the grounds that it would set back gender equity in sport.

On politics: Why you can’t change someone’s mind: If you’ve been feeling like political debate online leads nowhere, this podcast episode from London Review of Books is worth your time. Sarah Stein Lubrano challenges the idea that the “marketplace of ideas” actually works, arguing that better arguments don’t necessarily win—and may not even change minds. Instead, she explores how social ties and collective action are far more effective in shaping beliefs and driving change. It’s a sharp, thought-provoking listen that questions whether debate still serves democracy in the way we assume.

The feminist visionary who lost the plot: Elizabeth Cady Stanton believed that she was a person of “superior intelligence and courage.” This fuelled her radical politics—and her eventual descent into bigotry. Read Moira Donegan’s profile of Elizabeth in the New Yorker.

The loneliness epidemic [in data]: This intimate and data driven piece, The Pudding offers a powerful look at how we spend our time—and who we spend it with. Drawing on data from the American Time Use Survey, it follows a single day in 2021 through the lives of several people, including Martin. What emerges is something deeper than a daily routine: a portrait of growing isolation.

Want to explore more newsletters? In Postcards, we send you missives on the places, people and ideas that brought Team BehanBox joy. Our monthly offering Postscript invites you, the reader, into our newsroom to understand how the stories you read came to be – from ideation to execution. Subscribe for more.

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The conflict in West Asia has worsened over the last few days, killing many more, destroying homes and businesses and setting on fire critical energy infrastructure in the region. It has sent oil and gas prices soaring and confirmed our worst fears about supply disruption. A significant portion of India’s supply of LPG comes from West Asia and through the embattled Strait of Hormuz. There are reports from across the country of early signs of the distress rising from the crisis: of panic buying of LPG cylinders, shortages caused by hoarding, migrant workers from impacted sectors heading home in anticipation of tougher times ahead, catering establishments downing shutters and mid day meal schemes facing the fuel squeeze and returning to firewood.

This week we bring you a deeply moving yet objectively argued essay on how a new Bill threatens the very existential right of transgender individuals to self identify. Also an analysis of how India’s latest Budget addresses the resource crunch faced by the care sector.

The blow came out of nowhere. A little over a week ago, the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill, 2026, was introduced in the Lok Sabha, leaving the transgender and LGBTQI+ communities stunned. It redefined how the State will see the transgender individuals and its rights, posing what amounts to an existential threat to an entire community. And given the speed with which Bills have been railroaded into law in the recent past — with little or no consultation with those who they impact or even the opposition — the panic and anxiety it has generated is understandable.

The Bill could upend years of progress in the field of trans rights, especially the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019, Act – to which it is an amendment – and before that the landmark NALSA judgement. The 2019 Act recognised the fact that gender identity may or may not align with the sex assigned at birth, prohibited discrimination against transgender persons in education, employment, healthcare, housing and so on and also ensured an individual’s right to self-identify their gender. It was not the most perfect of laws and there was disappointment that it asked for a District Magistrate’s stamp of approval on an application for an identity certificate to confirm and also did not consider demands for reservation.

But the Bill pretty much undoes even the critical gains the last law made. It seeks to remove the very fundamental provision of self identification. Mridula Chari, an independent non-binary journalist, writes for BehanBox a strongly argued personal essay on why the bill will put a question mark on the very existence of the trans community.

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“The proposed amendment to the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019, would have me believe that I do not exist. This is laughable, considering how long I spent looking for myself, despite a rich, expansive trans world existing right beside me. The care I took to be beyond certain that I was indeed what I wanted to claim that I was took years. What could have changed had acceptance been the norm instead of the stigma and silence that hid the vibrant voices of the trans community?” they write.

Mridula writes about the alarming implications of the Bill – the misguided conflation of intersex identities with transgender identities, the retrospective legal erasure of trans men and the trans women who do not belong to “traditional” communities, non-binary people, and any other self-determined gender identity. It also presumes that nobody can be transgender without being coerced into medical procedures while adding even more layers of bureaucracy to the process of legal and medical transition.

What is even more hurtful is that the Bill will effectively kill the vital support systems for transgender people, says Mridula. “I would not have come out had I not had my hand held metaphorically by the dozens of trans people I followed online. When I found words for my identity, I began to look for myself everywhere. I devoured anything written by trans men, from PhD dissertations to memoirs. I spent hours looking up queer magazines for first-person essays. When I did come out, I realised that my straight, cis world did not contain the expansiveness and acceptance that I would find in my mid-30s, when I was embraced by my queer community, largely 20-somethings, in Mumbai,” Mridula writes.

Read the story here.

Last November, we launched our Care Vertical, a long-term project to expand how we understand, report, and talk about ‘care’ in India, through data, stories, and lived experiences – from the margins and frontlines. As economist Neetha N told us in an interview that care work is an amorphous and vast area of labour, much of which is also emotional and familial and outside the reach of the State, or even community, intervention. It is paid for some unpaid for others.

Last month when the Budget was announced, we asked ourselves – is it possible to link its implications for the care sector which still remains undefined? Saumya Kalia painstakingly worked her way through the various schemes and allocations to understand some of these ramifications.

In earlier budgets, care was hinted at – in women’s employment, childcare support, welfare delivery, and now, elderly care. But this Budget, for the first time, looked at care as a sector warranting a trained workforce. At the same time, it continues to underspend on creches services, Anganwadi centres, health, education and omits the question of minimum wages for caregivers — factors critical to the care ecosystem.

“What the Budget offers are “symbolic gestures” – women’s hostels and health coverage for frontline health workers, for instance – but not structural long-term commitment,” Saumya writes. How is the government going to support community-based creches? Will frontline scheme workers get minimum wages? Does the Budget see caste and how marginalised women are overrepresented in low-paying care jobs?

Read our analysis here.

Award, Despite #metoo: Jnanpith, India’s premier literary award, goes this year to Tamil lyricist Vairamuthu. The news has been deeply upsetting for all those who put their lives and careers on stake to spearhead the #metoo campaign. The poet had been accused of sexual harassment by several women, of them, the singer Chinmayi Sripada was among the most vocal. In an interview, she pointed out that when powerful establishments continue to platform and work with offenders, it emboldens every form of misogyny.

One Song After Another: First it was rapper Badshah and his awful Tateeree with its thinly veiled sexualised references to schoolgirls. And now there is Sarke Chunar Teri Sarke, an obscene item number from a Kannada film, KD: The Devil, translated into Hindi among other languages and widely released over YouTube as a promotional for the film. Following outrage, both songs have been taken off various platforms. Everyone involved is claiming they didn’t quite know how the song would shape up. But what this, and dozens of other songs that escaped similar censure, establish is how formulaic the approach to making a ‘hit’ song is and it mostly involves every sexist trope available.

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A Cause Betrayed: A New York Times investigation has revealed that the revered US civil rights leader Cesar Chavez, who campaigned for farm workers’ rights in California in the 1960s and 1970s, had sexually abused women and girls involved in the labour movement. Leading these shocking disclosures was Dolores Huerta, who with Chavez, co-founded the United Farm Workers union. “I have kept this secret long enough,” said Dolores, now almost 96, in a statement. “My silence ends here.” The survivors said they did not report Chavez because they did not wish to hurt the labour movement and also because they feared they would not be believed. Equally tellingly, Dolores has talked about the sexism in the labour movement, where women leaders like her were denied the credit due to them.

In Search Of Banksy: For years, a sudden appearance of his art, political and provocative, sparked questions of his identity. And then, people just made peace with the idea that the art could be enjoyed without the eternal question–but who is Banksy? This Reuters investigation sparks the debate:if an artist chooses anonymity, why should we go searching for them? Do read this and let us know which side of the debate are you on?

How to write about Africa: We’re resurfacing this timeless piece at a particularly fraught moment—partly as a source of light relief, but also as a gentle guide for how we might think about places that lie east of the Prime Meridian and south of the equator.

Hunting the Jinn of Jerusalem: What binds Arabic words jinn, majnun (madness, obsession), janna (paradise) and Janin (embryo)? If, like us, you love words, their etymology and ideas and the thrill of the supernatural, then this profile of Ahmed Nabil and his work is what you will love reading over the weekend.

Want to explore more newsletters? In Postcards, we send you missives on the places, people and ideas that brought Team BehanBox joy. Our monthly offering Postscript invites you, the reader, into our newsroom to understand how the stories you read came to be – from ideation to execution. Subscribe for more.

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Those of us who thought that the rain of fire streaking across the skies in West Asia would leave our lives mostly untouched are in for a nasty shock. LPG supplies in India have been hit by the disruption of LPG shipment through the embattled Strait of Hormuz, caught in the US-Israel-Iran conflict. The first to take the blow are restaurants and hotels that use commercial LPG. Many are closed or running limited operations. Fear of a crisis is driving up the sale of induction stoves and building queues at petrol pumps. The government in the meanwhile maintains that all is well.

This week, we bring you a superb report that questions claims about what home-based chikankari work actually does for women’s empowerment in a small town off Lucknow. And a personal essay on what it means to go bald in a society that eulogises the femininity of long hair.

In its campaign in the 1970s to organise poorly paid homebased bidi workers in Gujarat, mostly women from poor and marginalised homes, SEWA activists went to meet the labour commissioner. He maintained that they are not workers. “They just do it to pass their time hence the employer-employee relationship is not applicable.”

That is how home-based work for women is seen even today – ‘time pass’ squeezed into the cycle of cooking, cleaning, caring for the young and elderly. Even when it holds up an entire household or a big part of it, it is not dignified as employment and the earnings as income. And even when the homebased work requires tremendous artisanal expertise.

Embroidery and empowerment came to be linked when in the late 1970s, SEWA led the movement to support women’s crafts skills across Patan, Banaskantha and Kutch in Gujarat and Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh. Aari, rabari, chindi, bandhni, soi bharat, mutva and of course chikankari. But close to 50 years after these efforts began, it is time to assess exactly what these initiatives have done to empower women.

Researcher Garima Agarwal spent eight months in Katra Bazaar in Kakori, just off Lucknow, between 2020 and 2021 following the lives and labour of 15 households where the women were engaged in chikankari work. This is important and valuable work – at least 2.5 lakh people depend directly on chikankaari, and the industry is valued at over Rs 4,000 crore annually, generating at least Rs 200 crore in indirect export revenue. The UP government proudly cites it as a model of women’s economic inclusion – a craft that brings employment to women’s doorsteps without requiring them to leave home.

Garima’s investigations found that despite the long hours of labour-intensive work, women are underpaid, and their income dismissed as “pocket money”. And the very features that make the craft “suitable” for women—its home-based nature, its flexibility, its piece-rate structure—are what trap them in low-paid, invisible work.

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“The “empowerment through craft” narrative, I found, hides the deeper structural problems that shape women’s work by celebrating income without choice, agency or control. What matters is who controls production, who sets prices, and who has the option to walk away,”
Garima says.

In Kakori, over 80% of women are involved in the chikankaari industry. So Garima’s findings are strongly indicative of how women in the crafts sector are treated. Economic participation, she found, has neither shifted their social position nor integrated them meaningfully into markets. And their dependence on middlemen means no visibility, no control over finished products, and no pricing power. The home is both the workplace and the boundary, she concludes.

Read the story here.

In a sharp, and hysterically funny essay published in 2012 in Kafila, Malayali historian and feminist J Devika had written about the ludicrously important place that long hair holds in the idea of feminine beauty in Kerala. As a youngster, in rebellion against her grandmother’s routine of “combing, plaiting, oiling, washing with shoe-flower paste” her hair, Devika decides to get herself a “fashionable bob”. Predictably, all hell broke loose.

“The female part of the household went into deep mourning: my mother on one cot, my grandmother on another, and the lady cook, and the lady helpers standing here and there all stooped, heads down, one arm crossed on the waist, another bearing the weight of a mournful-looking face.”

It is not just Kerala, across India and in many parts of the world, hair isn’t just about beauty, it is also bound up with issues of religion, culture, and social identity. So when Kerala’s ASHA workers decided last year to chop off their hair in public as a mark of protest against exploitative work conditions, the move was nothing short of radical. They were not the first to use tonsure as a form of protest. Across the world, women have shaved their heads for deeply personal and political reasons – to reclaim agency after an illness, challenge traditional norms of beauty, break free from patriarchal notions of femininity, or simply mark new beginnings.

In a personal essay, Priya Menon talks about why she was at 51, drawn to the idea of tonsure. “I saw it not just as an act of shedding vanity but also as a means to reclaim agency over my own life. As the first locks of hair fell, I felt a rush of freedom and joy. And when I gazed into my eyes in the mirror, I felt that I was meeting myself for the first time,” she writes.

Read the story here.

Gig Workers Hit: Among those left anxious by the commercial LPG crisis are gig workers whose livelihood depends on quick delivery of food from restaurants. With restaurants, dhabas, cloud kitchens and other food vendors resigned to full or partial closure, daily orders have fallen by 50-60%, says the Gig and Platform Service Workers Union (GIPSWU). They have issued a statement asking that in view of the crisis, workers be protected from financial shocks and not penalised for delayed deliveries.

Asylum For Footballers: Five members of the Iranian women’s football team who sought asylum in the course of the Asian cup tournament have been allowed to stay on in Australia, reports Al Jazeera. It was feared that they would be punished at home for not singing the Iranian national anthem before their first match against South Korea. This act was described as the “pinnacle of dishonour” by a commentator of Iran’s IRIB state broadcaster. The match started around the time Iran was struck by air strikes launched by the US and Israel, killing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Global football players’ union FIFPRO said the team could be labelled “wartime traitors”.

Anti-Abortion Fears: With Jose Antonio Kast, an ultra conservative taking office as President, women’s rights activists in Chile fear that abortion rights will be in peril. Kast, according to Guardian, has opposed moves to ensure rights and equal opportunities for women in his 30-year political career. He opposed the 2017 legalisation of abortion under limited exceptions and since then pushed to bring back a total ban on abortion.

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Birth Rate Push: The Glorious Letter reports on what it calls the ‘Baby Letter’ – the French government’s mail campaign to disseminate what it calls a “targeted, balanced, and scientifically sound information on sexual and reproductive health” to everyone at age 29. It is to be a part of France’s new “demographic rearmament” plan which includes research and care support for reproductive issues and the establishment of 70 egg-freezing centres by 2028. But this effort to fix declining birth rates – at a time when pronatalism is spreading – is not going to go anywhere as long as social structures around childcare do not change, argue experts.

Defeat As Method: “How can one think from within brokenness, from within the ruins, and still produce meaning, and even possibility?” In these dark times, anthropologist Shahram Khosravi looks at defeat as a method to demand justice, speculate the impossible and envision life beyond the ruins of racial capitalism and colonial racism.

A Woman Should Be Ambitious…but also come home and cook food’: In this Vittles magazine essay, Saba Imtiaz digs into the archives in Karachi to see how women have continuously forged and documented culinary histories in Pakistan.

The Subverse: If you want a momentary escape from the horrors of the world, we have a podcast recommendation that invites you to explore the wondrous. The Subverse, presented by Dark ‘n’ Light is a podcast that uncovers the hidden and marginal in stories about nature, culture and social justice.

Want to explore more newsletters? In Postcards, we send you missives on the places, people and ideas that brought Team BehanBox joy. Our monthly offering Postscript invites you, the reader, into our newsroom to understand how the stories you read came to be – from ideation to execution. Subscribe for more.

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Hello Behans!

Suddenly, we have on our hands a war that nobody wanted. As feminists, we at BehanBox have always argued, war is a masculine enterprise advancing the military industrial complex as well as patriarchy. We did this when India and Pakistan pulled back from the brink of calamitous hostilities last year. And we do so now when the lethal aerial attacks between US and Israel on one side and Iran on the other threaten the lives of millions across West Asia. It is the innocent who pay the biggest price in a war as sabre-rattling strongmen refuse to sit at the table and talk. And now the use of AI tools in the US strikes has given us a terrifying new unknown.

This is exactly why we need a strong feminist media infrastructure and allies willing to challenge the resurgence of a dangerous masculine narrative. At a time when funding for feminist journalism is shrinking, the Fuller Project continues to do essential work exposing the rollback of women’s rights under authoritarian regimes. Their issue on Revolutions is a must-read. Women are often at the forefront of struggles for democracy, yet when protest gives way to policymaking, their roles are diminished and their demands sidelined. In this issue, Ester Pinheiro looks at Nepal’s Gen Z protests, where women survivors of gender-based violence took justice into their own hands as the system around them faltered.

We are kicking off Women’s History Month with a fascinating excerpt from the memoir of Mallu Swarajyam, a revolutionary woman leader of the 1940s’ agrarian movement from Telangana. And a personal essay on who gets to be a social worker and who gets to remain a field worker forever.

In popular imagination, social work is an equitable field where everyone works for the higher ideals of altruism and social upliftment, unaffected by questions of caste or class. But researcher Srimoyee Biswas argues that social work in India is a highly contested terrain – that the ideals are often masked by unequal power structures in which this work is practised.

When Sunita “enters” the field in south Delhi’s Kusumpur Pahadi, she does not arrive at a site of work — her life begins and remains within it. For, the basti is not a destination for the community mobiliser; it is her home. She is not armed with a degree, does not have the backing of an institution, a regular salary or the resources that it can afford her.

What she does have however is priceless – trust that emerges from shared histories, social location and everyday proximity. She is, at once, a social worker and someone who lives the very conditions she documents. When she defines herself as a social worker it is a deliberate and political stance: she wants to be recognised as someone who works for the society she belongs to, not as an intermediary acting upon it.

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“People feel comfortable talking to me about their problems, especially women from my community,” she explains. “They see me as one of their own.”

Kusumpur Pahari is shaped by the persistent kind of infrastructural neglect that most such settlements deal with. Water supply, for one, is a huge challenge, structuring the rhythms of everyday life. Early in the morning, women spill into the gallis, veils drawn loosely over their heads, their bodies already at work. The children linger close by, the older ones helping with the repetitive labour of survival. These scenes are familiar, almost routine and they are also moments of frequent documentation.

“Researchers like myself pass through, members of the press arrive with microphones, photographs are taken, sound bites recorded, surveys completed, and consent forms signed,” recounts Srimoyee. But little changes. Despite recent efforts to foreground agency and reflexivity, hierarchy continues to structure the production of social knowledge, she says. Caste occupies a particularly complex position within this dynamic even in urban settings.

If social work as a discipline claims to be ‘transformative’, then the labour that sustains it, especially of Bahujan women, has to be institutionally valued and materially recognised. Anything less risks the chance of reproducing the same hierarchies the discipline aims to dismantle, says Srimoyee.

Read the essay here.

In her introduction to The Fire of Defiance, feminist historian Uma Chakravarty talks of an iconic black and white image of four women kneeling on the ground, wielding arms and ready to fire. What few know, she says, is that in this photograph that is symbolic of the armed agrarian struggle against the tyranny of the feudal systems in Telangana of the 1940s, features a remarkable woman leader – Mallu Swarajyam.

The Fire of Defiance is her memoir as told to Uma, Vimala Morthala, S Katyayini. This week we publish an excerpt from this unputdownable book published by SouthSide Story and Zubaan.

The historic battle waged by Swarajyam and her comrades was against the doras, powerful upper-caste zamindars who enforced oppressive rules of forced labour or vetti on sharecroppers and agricultural labourers. The story of the struggle itself is riveting but what is equally riveting is the story of the women who led it or participated in it.

Swarajyam was born to a small zamindar family where the usual rules of patriarchy applied. But her older brother was keenly engaged with the movement and her mother was as supportive as she could be even as the older men of the family frowned on the rising rebellion.

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Our excerpt dwells on the years just after Independence when the rebels were being squeezed on both sides – by the Nizam’s soldiers and the Central forces.

“In addition to my work in the committee, I had another responsibility: to recruit women for the dalams. As I mentioned earlier, if the men of a family were already our members or allies, their women could also join the dalam. Otherwise, it took a lot of effort to get women to join. Some women even ran away from their homes to join us. They accepted all duties, just as the men did,” she writes.

There was Ramulamma from Cherukupalli village in Nalgonda taluka who was captured by the landlords and handed over to the police. She stood amidst the police and delivered a speech to her dalam. There was Nagamma who was so short that when she carried the rifle on her shoulders, it touched the ground. ‘It’s okay, I will carry the gun over my head, but I have to have one,’ she insisted, says Swarajyam.

But even in the midst of this turbulent resistance movement, sexism prevailed. The women went through pregnancies, domestic fissures, child care, menstruation and multiple other very physical challenges and coped on their own or with help from each other. “None of these arrangements were made by the leaders. The women involved were steadfast in their dedication to protecting the movement and made countless sacrifices without hesitation for its advancement,” says Swarajyam.

Read our excerpt here.

Nepal Votes: Nepal voted this week to elect a new parliament, the first to assess public mood after the so-called Gen Z protests against corruption and economic distress brought down the government. In a landslide victory, the 35-year-old rapper-turned-politician Balendra Shah defeated the veteran and ousted Marxist leader KP Sharma Oli. But as Himal reports, of the 3,484 candidates in this election, only 395 (11%) are women. And they face a host of challenges, not the least of which is a sexist social media backlash.

Death Of A Feminist: Iraqi women’s right activist Yanar Mohammed was assassinated this week by gunmen outside her home in Baghdad. She was one of the country’s most prominent women’s rights activists who has been active for over two decades to fight gender-based violence, “including domestic abuse, trafficking, and so-called ‘honour killings’”, as per the human rights group, Front Line Defenders.

Incel Blather: The incel jargon, which is pure gobbledygook, has apparently turned mainstream. The US Department of Defense described the lethal capabilities of the US military as: “Low cortisol. Locked in. Lethalitymaxxing”, reports Guardian, adding that “algorithms, in-jokes and a Trump administration keyed into the language of these communities”. Leading this linguistic assault are leading incel icons such as Braden Peters or Clavicular, the star “looksmaxxer” whose title refers to his spectacular clavicles that he believes defines male beauty. All the clever wordplay can be summarised in one word – misogyny.

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Back To The Beginning: Gen Z men are twice as likely as Baby Boomer men to have traditional views on decision-making within a marriage, shows a survey conducted by Ipsos in the UK and the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s Business School London. The 29-country survey that included India found that close to a quarter of Gen Z men believe that women should not appear “too independent” or initiate sex. A good 59% are of the view that all talk around gender equality has gone “too far”.

We’re reported, here and here, how heat stress is contributing to a labour rights crisis and why it’s particularly threatening for women. New evidence from HeatWatch and Tata Institute of Social Sciences illustrates this vulnerability.

Out of the 115 garment workers surveyed in Delhi-NCR, Tamil Nadu, and Gujarat, 87% workers experienced symptoms including headaches, dizziness, and muscle cramps, and 78% skipped breaks, which doubled their stress levels and reduced their ability to cope with extreme heat.

For women, lack of sanitation facilities and poor work conditions contributed to health ailments.

“When we ask for fans, or even to use the toilet more often, we are criticised — ‘Don’t you have AC at home?’ Most management and owners are men, so there is no one to recognise heat stress as a real labour issue for women,” says Jothi, a garment worker from Tirupur.

Extreme climate conditions – paired with long working hours, gender dynamics, inadequate safety measures and insufficient heat adaptation policies – are jeopardising the lives and health of India’s women garment workers, the report found.

It is important to demand better working conditions and recognise heat as an occupational hazard. What other measures are working in your communities? Tell us in the comments below.

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If you’re trying to make sense of the ongoing war in West Asia, these essential readings offer crucial context and perspective.

The Dry and Wet Burn Together: “‘The dry and the wet burn together’ is a Persian expression invoked when a fire spreads without discrimination”- thus begins this most essential reading on the current war by Eskander Sadeghi-Boroujerdi. The war launched against Iran by the United States and Israel is a war of choice and of hubris, he says.

History of Modern Iran: Here is a five-part radio documentary on the history of modern Iran by Eskander Sadeghi-Boroujerdi and Golnar Nikpour.

Dance and Doves: In Iran, as mourners come to terms with the death of their loved ones, they are defying the Shiite mourning norms, as a mode of resistance against the regime.

Want to explore more newsletters? In Postcards, we send you missives on the places, people and ideas that brought Team BehanBox joy. Our monthly offering Postscript invites you, the reader, into our newsroom to understand how the stories you read came to be – from ideation to execution. Subscribe for more.

Our weekly newsletter brings you our top stories, gender news from the world, and our team’s reading recommendations.

Hello Behans!

Welcome to BehanVox, our weekly newsletter.

This week, we have the last of our AI summit pieces. The summit may be over but the necessary conversations need to continue–ones that centre labour, regulations and the human and environmental costs.

But before that, help us Behans out! We are looking for a platforms editor and community coordinator—basically someone who will take our reportage and stories to the world in myriad forms. A detailed job description is here.

The dust has finally settled on the AI Summit, the buyers and sellers, officials and nerds have all departed and it seemed to us like a good time to step back and look at what it achieved and what it missed. Saumya Kalia sought out the expertise of Anita Gurumurthy and Nandini Chami, researchers at IT For Change, a non-profit working on technology and society, to put into context the emerging debates around AI, to raise some critical questions. How is India trying to govern AI technologies? What economic and political thinking influenced this? Where are gender and caste in these conversations?

It is important, the researchers said, at this point of AI’s rise to bust the myth of its ungovernability and put public interest firmly in the middle of the conversation. And to question its approach so far on the issue – market first and light on regulation – which has allowed AI enterprises to neglect safeguards.

Albeit the rhetoric of Summit themes like Indic language models and open cloud infrastructure and declarations on data sovereignty and development-oriented visions at BRICs, India is on the backfoot in protecting its nascent data and AI industry from the onslaught of UK, US and EU markets, say the scholars. And most importantly the business of AI should not overshadow the questions of ethics and inclusion and structural justice, they emphasise.

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“We have to think about orchestrating a governance environment that aligns our concerns around inclusion, transformation, and more with resource allocation, public interest, ethics, citizen participation, public-private boundary management etc. It is about building a pathway to industrialisation all over again in the AI moment,” say Anita and Nandini.

Read the interview here. Saumya Kalia also puts together her thoughts on the AI summit and some of the conversations she was a part of that were lost in the humdrum. Watch the video here.

Kerala – Left, Right and Centre: With Kerala elections looming large and much excitement building over which way its restless electorate will swing, the state is suddenly the focus of much attention, real and celluloid. To begin with the Union cabinet headed by the PM gave its consent for the formal re-christening of Kerala to Keralam. And, a huge debate has erupted over the second instalment of director Vipul Shah’s love jihad-obsessed Kerala Story that itself was riddled with gaping errors. Opening in theatres on February 27 after the Kerala High Court cleared its release, the trailer of the new film that shows a woman being force-fed beef and parotta has elicited fury and derision in equal parts from the state. A storm of memes followed. To make matters worse, the film’s team landed up for a press conference in Delhi with 30 women who were the alleged victims of the so-called love jihad. None of them, it turns out, was a Malayali.

Ask The Parents: The Gujarat government has sought changes to the Gujarat Registration of Marriages Act to mandate that couples be required to declare if they have parental consent for the marriage. Deputy chief minister and home minister Harsh Sanghavi says the move is needed because “innocent girls are being trapped”. This is despite the fact that the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld the right of consenting adults to marry as a fundamental right guaranteed by the Constitution. Since 2019, a range of states have passed stringent and completely vague anti-conversion laws (the so-called ‘love jihad’ laws), as feminist legal researcher Surbhi Karwa said in an interview to BehanBox. As feminists have pointed out, apart from interfering with an individual’s right of choice it also infantilises adult women as figures in lifelong need of state and family protection.

Unemployed But Not Idle: An unemployed wife whose carework plays a critical role in helping her spouse work and earn cannot be considered “idle” when questions of maintenance have to be decided in the case of a divorce, Delhi High Court has ruled. Her work holds an “economic value” as she manages a household, cares for children and adjusts her life around her spouse’s career, the court pointed out: “These responsibilities do not appear in bank statements or generate taxable income, yet they form the invisible structure on which many families function.” In an interview with BehanBox, economist Neetha N had argued that contrary to popular perception, though carework is emotional labour, it requires skills and must thus be valued the way formal employment is.

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‘Fighting, Not Leaving’: The Unnao rape survivor, who lives under police protection in Delhi, is now pursuing a degree at Delhi University, and wants to study law, “to follow her own case through its final appeals—and to fight other rape cases that fade when the TV cameras move on” says a profile of the survivor in The Print. Her life is a constant round of court visits, some of them intimidating as she faces up to a battery of defence lawyers. “Now, it just feels like routine. I’m not there to be scared. I’m here to fight. I am not leaving,” she says.

A Prayer For Peace: Boong, a Manipuri film directed by Lakshmipriya Devi, won the Best Children’s & Family Film award at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards held last Sunday. The story of a boy who goes searching for his missing father against the backdrop of conflict, the film is a plea for peace, said Lakshmipriya in her acceptance speech. She added that her film is an homage to Manipur “which is very troubled, very much ignored and very unrepresented in India”.

“If you want to hire someone to care for your child, they need money, and I can’t afford that. The arrangement is fragile, if I fall sick or the caretaker leaves, my child is left without support.” - Priya, 30, a single mother with, an Urban Company worker

“I am working to meet my financial needs. If I am working, there should be some facility of childcare within the company.” - Ritika, 26, an Amazon warehouse worker in Manesar

These are two accounts of women — employed in platform companies and warehouse — as they struggle to balance quality childcare with the rigid demands of informal work.

A new study by Mobile Crèches spotlights childcare challenges of women engaged in platform and warehouse work—different forms of gig work. It is also the first of its kind to articulate the “care-work conflict” in platform-mediated work. This work appealed to women for its perceived flexibility, but constant monitoring, algorithmic control, and task allocation present a conflict with the demands of childcare.

Since women manage both paid work and caregiving responsibilities, they currently have informal arrangements. The elder daughter would stay at home; husbands and wives alternate day and night schedules; some like Neha rely on community-based caregiving. The studied warehouse workers in Manesar have a greater need for physical crèches near their workspace. Currently there is only one operational Anganwadi centre, which refused to enrol migrant children. When they do, women worry about the environment and level of supervision.

The anxieties and emotional burden are more for single mothers. For children, the long parental absences, irregular work schedules and informal arrangements compromise their safety, nutrition, and learning.

“The intersection of gendered care responsibilities, labour process control, and precarious employment thus reproduces gender inequalities and exposes women and children to cumulative risks,” the study says.

Are you an academic, research, or union worker engaging with these questions? We would love to know your experiences and learning. Write to us.

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Trial of Giselle Pelicot: After France convicted 51 men, including her husband, of drugging and raping her while unconscious, Gisèle Pelicot became a feminist figure and catalyst for debate on consent. Yet the public trial’s revelations fractured her family, especially as her daughter accused her father of abusing her too, complicating Pelicot’s personal narrative of justice and resilience.

Secret Marriages and Serial Divorce in Mauritania: In post independence Mauritania, women are negotiating intimacy, faith and money. Serial divorce and secret marriages are part of the rapidly evolving social landscape in a nation that has had one of the world’s most profound transformations over the last half-century, write Josef Skrdlik and Oliver Dunn in New Lines Magazine.

The Boy’s Club: Jesscia Kutz of the 19th News scours through Epsteins’ emails and pieces together this story on how the disgraced financier’s influence shaped the exclusion of women in STEM.

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