Category Archives: South and Central Asia

Dhaka fire: many feared trapped as people leap from high-rise block

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At least 19 people killed, say officials, including six who jumped from 22-floor building

Desperate workers have jumped to their deaths as a huge fire tore through a Dhaka office block, killing at least 19 people and trapping others in the latest major inferno to hit the Bangladesh capital.

Rescue workers warned the death toll could rise sharply as fire fighters recovered charred bodies from the complex where an unknown number of office workers were engulfed by intense smoke and flames.

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Many feared trapped as people escape Dhaka office building fire – video

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A huge fire has torn through a 19-storey office building in the commercial area of Bangladesh's capital, Dhaka, prompting some people to climb down the exterior of the building. People were seen shouting for help from windows, with many office workers feared to be trapped inside

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Kumbh Mela: cleaning up after the world’s largest human gathering

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Around 220 million people descended on sleepy Prayagraj (formerly Allahabad) for the 50-day Hindu festival. The cleanup could take months

As the sun sets over the Ganges, Vikas Kumar drives his garbage truck through the streets of Prayagraj, a historic Indian city of 1.1 million that was until last year known as Allahabad. “All this stuff people have been eating, drinking and throwing away,” he says, gesturing at piles of food waste, discarded water bottles and mud-spattered flowers. “It will take three or four months to clear.”

Over a 50-day period this normally sleepy city has been visited by around 220 million people for the Kumbh Mela – a Hindu pilgrimage dubbed the world’s largest human gathering.

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US efforts to rebuild Afghanistan beset by ‘theft and abuse from security forces’

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Government watchdog reveals contract workers subjected to assault and unlawful detention, with property confiscated

A report into US efforts to rebuild Afghanistan’s war-damaged infrastructure has called for urgent action after revealing that Afghan security forces have been harassing, abusing and stealing from contractors at military bases.

Members of the Afghan national defence and security forces (ANDSF) have held workers at gunpoint and confiscated their equipment, costing the US hundreds of thousands of dollars, a US government watchdog said.

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‘A double-edged sword’: Mumbai pollution ‘perfect’ for flamingos

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The flamingo population of India’s largest city has tripled. Is it thanks to sewage boosting the blue-green algae they feed on?

There is an air of anxious excitement among the urban professionals and tourists on board our 24-seater motorboat as we enter Thane Creek.

A chorus of “oohs” and “aahs” breaks out as we spot the visions in pink we came to see – hundreds of flamingos listlessly bobbing in the murky green water – followed by the furious clicking of cameras.

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‘The country could fall apart’: drought and despair in Afghanistan

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As a funding appeal languishes, conflict, poverty and the worst drought for a decade have left millions facing desperate hunger

Shafiqa watches closely over her six-month-old niece. Lying on a bundle of fabric, Maryam’s legs jut out, thin and pale. When they arrived at hospital two weeks ago, she could hardly breathe. Her body was swollen with malnutrition, her lips and fingers were blue.

There are 24 children being treated at Mofleh paediatric hospital’s malnutrition ward, on the outskirts of Herat city, western Afghanistan. Mothers and aunts lean next to hospital beds, some rocking tiny babies back and forth.

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Kachin women from Myanmar ‘raped until they get pregnant’ in China

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Women from Kachin minority are allowed to go home only if they leave baby behind, says HRW report

Burmese and Chinese authorities are turning a blind eye to a growing trade in women from Myanmar’s Kachin minority, who are taken across the border, sold as wives to Chinese men and raped until they become pregnant, a report claims.

Some of the women are allowed to return home after they have given birth, but are forced to leave their children, according to an investigation by Human Rights Watch, titled Give Us a Baby and We’ll Let You Go.

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‘It’s a godsend’: the healthcare scheme bringing hope to India’s sick

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In a country where treatment can cost two years’ wages, a new project could mean free medical care for 500 million people

Rajiv Gupta has a distinct spring in his step. He has brought his mother to New Delhi from the northern state of Bihar for a hip replacement, for which he won’t have to pay. His mother qualified for free treatment under Ayushman Bharat, the government’s ambitious new health insurance scheme.

“I can’t quite believe this is happening. When the doctors in Bihar told me it would cost 200,000 rupees [£2,180], I took mum home. That kind of money is impossible for me. I just run a tiny sari shop. And now she’s getting it done here free,” says Gupta. Then he hurries off as though scared he has got it wrong and someone is going to present him with a bill.

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Kazakhstan president Nazarbayev steps down after 30 years in power

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Nursultan Nazarbayev has led oil-rich country since fall of the Soviet Union

Kazakhstan’s president has announced his retirement after nearly 30 years as leader of the central Asian nation – but he will likely remain a power behind the throne, analysts said, as he retains key posts in Kazakhstan’s military and political bureaucracy.

Nursultan Nazarbayev has led the oil-rich country since the fall of the Soviet Union, first as its Communist leader and then as president after independence.

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Social workers can do so much more than just pick up the pieces

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At its best, social work can break cycles of crisis, and help people change their lives and communities

  • Guardian Jobs: see the latest vacancies in social care

Too often, social services are designed as rotating doors. They focus on individuals in crisis who, when the symptoms of the emergency have eased, are sent directly back to the stressful situation that caused all the damage – a painful, costly and tragic cycle.

There is little focus in formal social services on helping people to transform their environments to provide ongoing support and love, let alone engaging people to become advocates for their rights. Yet outside these limitations, social workers are supporting connections in communities designed to last people’s whole lifetimes. In many countries we call it “working beyond services”. There are countless examples around the world.

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‘There are few gay people in India’: stigma lingers despite legal victory | Michael Safi and Aarti Singh

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A landmark ruling legalised gay sex in the country in 2018, yet the LGBT community still face stigma and violence

When India’s supreme court announced it was legalising gay sex, people hugged in twos and threes on the lawns outside the Delhi courthouse. They draped themselves in rainbow flags in Bangalore and released balloons into the sky. In Mumbai’s nightclubs, they danced all night.

In Patna, the dusty capital of the east Indian state of Bihar, Roshni did nothing. “We felt good when people were marching in Delhi and Mumbai,” she says. “Everyone wanted to follow [them], but then we feared what other people would think – how they would react.”

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Fighting a ‘double curse’: Afghanistan’s hopefuls for Paralympic gold | Stefanie Glinski

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Prejudice faced by Afghan women with a disability has proved no barrier to its national wheelchair basketball team

Nilofar Bayat played her first game of wheelchair basketball in an open court in the middle of Kabul, surrounded by mainly male onlookers who shouted insults and called her names.

She decided to keep playing anyway.

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Fires of Jharia spell death and disease for villagers

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The inhabitants of a remote village at the heart of India’s coal industry brave deadly sinkholes and toxic gases simply to survive

In the village of Liloripathra, in a remote corner of India’s eastern Jharkhand state, mother-of-three Sushila Devi grips the hands of two women sitting on either side of her. Coal fires spew clouds of smoke into the already heavy, polluted air.

At about 8pm, a policeman cradling a small body wrapped in black plastic bags emerges through the smoke and the crowds that have gathered around her home. He has come to deliver the body of her 13-year-old daughter Chanda, killed along with two others from the village when a coal mine caved in on top of them. They had been scavenging in a colliery operated by Bharat Coking Coal Limited (BCCL), a subsidiary of state-owned Coal India.

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Kazakh police arrest activist who campaigned for human rights in Xinjiang

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Serikjan Bilash, who has fought for victims of China’s Muslim internment camps, detained in Almaty

Kazakh police have arrested an activist who has campaigned for victims of China’s internment camps in Xinjiang, sealing his group’s office and taking its computers.

Serikjan Bilash, who has led a high-profile awareness drive centred on ethnic Kazakh victims of China’s crackdown in the region, was arrested in Kazakhstan’s largest city Almaty and flown to the capital Astana, his partner told AFP.

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India to begin voting in election in April, says electoral commission

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Up to 900 million voters to cast ballots, as PM Narendra Modi seeks to replicate 2014 victory

Voting in the world’s largest democratic contest will begin on 11 April and continue for the next six weeks, India’s electoral commission has said in an announcement that signals the formal start of campaigning.

Polling booths will be shuttled around the country – by camel across the Rajasthan desert, on foot in the Himalayas and by speedboat in the Andaman Islands – for an election held in seven phases ending on 19 May. The ballots of up to 900 million eligible voters will be counted four days later.

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Fugitive Taliban leader lived short walk from US base, book reveals

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Exclusive: account exposes failures of US intelligence, which put $10m bounty on Mullah Omar

The Taliban’s elusive one-eyed leader Mullah Omar lived within walking distance of US bases in Afghanistan for years, and American troops once even searched the house where he was hiding but failed to find a secret room built for him, a new biography claims.

The account exposes an embarrassing failure of US intelligence, which put a $10m bounty on Omar’s head after the 9/11 attacks in the US. Officials repeatedly suggested that, like the al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, he was hiding in Pakistan and died there.

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Bodies of Tom Ballard and Daniele Nardi found in Himalayas

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Men went missing almost a fortnight ago while ascending mountain in Pakistan

The bodies of Tom Ballard and Daniele Nardi, the British and Italian climbers who went missing a fortnight ago, have been found on the mountain Nanga Parbat in Pakistan.

Italy’s ambassador to Pakistan, Stefano Pontecorvo, said on Saturday that the search team had confirmed that silhouettes spotted on the mountain “through telescope and pics beyond reasonable doubt” were the bodies of the two men.

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Women take to the streets of Pakistan to rewrite their place in society

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Campaigners will march on International Women’s Day to protest against harassment, child marriage and ‘honour killings’

During Jalwat Ali’s school days in Lahore, there were limited spaces to gather with other women, never mind flood the streets with punchy placards.

Public spaces often feel constricted in Pakistan, as though under critical male scrutiny. But over the past few days, Ali has been recruiting dozens of women, from garment workers to domestic helpers who barely get a day off. “To solve any problem, we need to make a collective effort,” she says.

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