Mourning for Rape Victim Recasts New Year\'s Eve in India

As my colleague Sruthi Gottipati reports, thousands of protesters marched on Monday in New Delhi, pledging to “take back the night,” as India remained in mourning for the 23-year-old victim of a gang rape who died on Saturday.

Thousands marching for gender justice on New Years eve. Many holding candles. #DelhiRape

- Sruthi Gottipati (@GoSruthi) 31 Dec 12

“The whole night is ours” protesters chant pouring out of JNU campus. “Reclaim Karo!”

- Sruthi Gottipati (@GoSruthi) 31 Dec 12

Monday night's march in the capital was just the latest in a series of protests across India in recent days.

A video report from Britain's Channel 4 News on anti-rape protests in India.

The Indian news channel IBN Live reported that New Year's Eve celebrations were scaled back or canceled in many parts of the country, replaced with protests, candlelight vigils and marches expressing widespread outrage at the failure to hold rapists accountable.

A video report from IBN Live, an Indian affiliate of CNN, on mourning for a rape victim who died on Saturday.

The death of the gang-rape victim came just days after an 18-year-old woman in Punjab State committed suicide by drinking poison after being raped by two men and then humiliated by male police officers. In the wake of the tragedies, Indian women, long accustomed to “regular harassment and assault during the day and are fearful of leaving their homes alone after dark,” poured into the streets to demand protection from the mainly male police force.

Pics:Women from Northeast #India came together in solidarity at #JantarManta r at recent #DelhiProtests http://t.co/qUb2e15k

- Binalakshmi Nepram (@BinaNepram) 31 Dec 12

Another Indian broadcaster, NDTV, also focused its coverage on the debate over sexual violence in the country on Monday, with a panel discussion of possible actions the government could take to address the crisis and an overview of the protests in recent days.

A video report from India's NDTV on anti-rape protests in recent days.

Subway Closings and Detentions Frustrate Protesters and New Year\'s Revelers in Delhi

Anjani Trivedi for The New York TimesProtesters at Jantar Mantar in Delhi on Dec. 29.

For New Year's Eve, a night that some call “the least safe” in Delhi, the Metro Rail Corporation management said it had shut three stations in central Delhi.

In a city where the subway is seen as one of the few forms of safe public transport, particularly for women, the decision to stop people from using the centrally located Rajiv Chowk, Barakhamba and Patel Chowk stations has residents fuming, with many seeing it as the latest attempt by the g overnment to keep protesters from assembling in central Delhi after a victim of a gang rape died over the weekend.

Only the Metro is affected. There are no road diversions on Monday, nor any traffic restrictions, said Rajan Bhagat, the public relations officer of the Delhi police.  He said that protesters had been trying to go to “prohibited areas” on Sunday, which prompted the police to block roads in central Delhi, but that on Monday the protesters were staying out of those areas, so there was no need to close any roads.

Mr.  Bhagat said that the police were allowing peaceful protests at Jantar Mantar and Ramlila Maidan. But when asked why the police shut the Metro stations and bus routes on Saturday when demonstrators tried to protest peacefully at Jantar Mantar, he declined to comment, saying th at he was too busy to answer such questions.

Upamanyu Raju, 21, a student from Delhi University who has helped organize protests over the last couple of weeks, said that a gathering of a few hundred people at the central park at Connaught Place at 2 p.m. on Monday was told to disperse by the police. The protesters then moved to Jantar Mantar via Janpath Road.

“We didn't want to have a confrontation with the police at this moment so we came to Jantar Mantar,” Mr. Raju said.

The authorities' attempts to block off the political center of the city have provoked public ire.

Meanwhile, one prominent protester has accused the government of harassment.

“I was detained by the Delhi police after we submitted a memorandum to the Home Minister with five-step action plan to deal with sexual violence against women and declared a protest,” said Tajinder Pal Singh Bagga, 27, president of Bhagat Singh Kranti Sena, a right-wing organization.

Mr. Bag ga and his organization began protesting at India Gate on Dec. 22. The day after, the local area police showed up at his home, he said.  Because he wasn't there, they detained his father for six hours and took him to India Gate to point out his son. But the police were not able to find the younger Mr. Bagga.

On Dec. 24, the police showed up again at his home.  This time, they took the younger Mr. Bagga to the police station.  He was ordered to stay there all day and report to the station every day until further notice, he said.

“They told me if I promised to stay at home and not protest, they would let me go,” Mr. Bagga said.  Subsequently, the police told him he could stop reporting to the station on Dec. 26.

Mr. Bagga's organization then called for a “Hang the Rapists” march for Saturday, spreading the word through Facebook, Twitter and e-mail and by putting up posters, he said.  However, Mr. Bagga could not attend â€" he had been detained th e previous day at 6:30 p.m., this time under the orders of the assistant commissioner of police of the Chanakyapuri area.

“They gave me no papers, didn't charge me with anything,” he said.  “There's a law â€" when they detain, they have to produce me in front of the magistrate within 24 hours, but they didn't.”

Thirty hours after his arrest, he was allowed to leave but now has one or two police officers standing outside his house, he said.

“We detained him as a precaution so that he wouldn't cause chaos,” said Surinder Sandhu, the local police officer who initially detained Mr. Bagga.  “We saw the posters and local information told us.”

Bhagat Singh Kranti Sena's call for action  “was a bit destructive,” the police officer said.

“We made an entry in our register, and we didn't have to give him any papers,” Mr. Sandhu said.  “Under Delhi Police Act Section 65, if you think they will cause disturbance, then we can det ain them for a few hours.”

Even though he was being watched by the police, Mr. Bagga pledged to keep fighting the government.

“I believe they are getting orders from the government and they think the protests will stop by doing all this,” Mr. Bagga said. “How can they government just stop us? It's our constitutional right.”

Image of the Day: Dec. 31

Biju Boro/Agence France-Presse - Getty ImagesAn installation made of sand, to welcome the new year, on the banks of Brahmaputra River, in Guwahati, Assam.

Delhi Starts Women\'s Hotline

The Delhi government started a 24-hour hotline for women on Monday, in an effort to address sexual harassment and violence against women in the city.

Women needing help in the nation's capital can now dial 181, and a counselor will offer relevant phone numbers of government agencies and contact the police if necessary.

“Any lady in any sort of problem” can call, said Jhuma Ganguly, a duty counselor at the hotline. “We'll inform other agencies to take action.”

The capital has been roiled with protests after the gang rape of a 23-year-old student on Dec.
16. After she died on Saturday, the government charged six suspects with rape and murder.
Protesters and activists have demanded that the law enforcement and judicial systems be
overhauled to combat sexual violence in the country.

Some critics acknowledged that the helpline was a positive step but called it a political quick fix
that did not hing to address the fact that the police often dissuade women from filing complaints
about sex crimes and that rape investigations and court cases drag on.

In a span of 12 hours, the hotline has received some 2,000 calls since 6 a.m., said Mrityunjay Kumar, a counselor at the helpline. He added, however, that while some were genuine complaints, many of the calls were to check that the hotline worked.

Mr. Kumar said that two operators would be available around the clock and were connected to all police stations in the city.

In Images: A History of Premier Automobiles

Kuni Takahashi for The New York TimesA Premier Padmini taxi in Mumbai, in this Dec. 8, 2012 file photo.

The black and yellow Padmini taxi is as identifiable with Mumbai as the Volkswagen Beetle taxi in Mexico City or the once ubiquitous Checker cab in New York. Alternately loathed and romanticized, the Padmini - or some version of it - was produced in Mumbai from 1964 to 2000 by Premier Automobiles. It became a favorite of taxi drivers in the 1970s because it was cheaper, easier to drive and more maneuverable than the tank-like Hindustan Ambassador, its main competition in Bombay, as the city was known then. For the individual motorist, it was attainable and passed for sporty in a tightly controlled automotive industry.

Courtesy of Premier AutomobilesA Fiat car, top right, and Dodge car, bottom left.

In 2008, the Maharashtra state government announced that taxis older than 25 years old were to be phased out, signaling the start of the Padmini's demise. At its peak in the 1990s, there were some 58,000 Padmini taxis plying the streets of Mumbai; today there are only around 9,000. The cabbies who drive them say they are cheap and easy to maintain and that they could stay on the roads forever. Most customers, however, prefer to ride in the newer, more modern cabs. But while the rickety and cramped Padmini will not likely be mourned by commuters, private collectors are becoming increasingly interested in them.

Courtesy of Premier AutomobilesAn award-winning Fiat 500, with Bombay license plates.

In the 1940s, Bombay-based Premier Automobiles Ltd (PAL) made Dodge cars and trucks as part of a deal with the American automaker Chrysler. After Independence, large American cars were seen by the socialist-leaning government as decadent, according to Maitreya Doshi, Premier's current managing direct or. So in 1952, PAL entered a joint venture to produce the more modest Fiat cars, like the 500 model, pictured in this image from a PAL annual report.

Courtesy of Premier AutomobilesThe Fiat 1100D produced by Premier.

The Fiat 1100D produced by Premier was essentially the same car as the Italian version that launched in 1962. Few changes were made to the design of the Indian version that still patrols the streets of Mumbai.

Courtesy of Premier AutomobilesPremier's cars being exported to Mauritius in the 1970s.

In 1972 the car was indigenized and the joint venture with Fiat was not renewed. For the 1973 model year it became the Premier President. In the 1970s Premier exported cars to Mauritius, as pictured here in this photo from a PAL annual report. Premier also exported cars to Dubai in the 1980s. ‘‘There were also stray exports to Latin America, Indonesia, Africa and Nepal in the 60s and 70s,'' said Maitreya Doshi, Premier's managing director.

Courtesy of Premier AutomobilesA Padmini Deluxe ‘B-E' model f rom the late 1980s.

In 1974, when an officious bureaucrat objected to the name ‘‘President,'' the car became the ‘‘Padmini,'' named after a 14th century Rajput princess. Many Mumbai residents still call it a ‘‘Fiat.'' The one pictured here is a Deluxe B-E model from the late 1980s, which featured chrome bumpers and hubcaps.

Courtesy of Premier AutomobilesAn advertisement for Padmini cars from the 1970s.

The Padmini's main competition was the Hindustan Ambassador, a large, bulbous car that still signifies power and officialdom. The Padmini was marketed as more aspirational, reflected in the slogans used to advertise it.

Before economic liberalization in 1991, the automotive industry was tightly regulated, so Premier wasn't allowed to implement too many improvements to the Padmini. Instead, it trumpeted the ones that it could make, such as the “stylish polyurethane steering wheel” and “ignition-cum-steering lock.”

As the automotive industry evolved slowly in the 1980s and then quickly in the 1990s, the Padmini remained a constant until production ceased in 2000.

Courtesy of Premier AutomobilesThe Premier 118NE launched in 1985.

Courtesy of Premier AutomobilesRio, a compact SUV, launched by Premier in 2012.

In 1985, Premier launched the 118NE, as part of a joint venture with Peugeot. It was modeled on a Fiat 124. Production was stopped in 1999 after Peugeot abandoned the joint venture, says Premier Managing Director Maitreya Doshi. The Fiat 124 was also the model for the Russian Lada.

Premier re-entered the car market with the launch of the Rio, a compact SUV, in 2012.

David Shaftel is a freelance journalist based in Mumbai.

A Conversation With: DataWind\'s Suneet Singh Tuli

Stan Honda/Agence France-Presse - Getty ImagesSuneet Singh Tuli.

Suneet Singh Tuli, the chief executive of DataWind, the company behind the $40 Aakash tablet, spoke to The New York Times in New York on Nov. 29, a day after the world's cheapest computer was unveiled by Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, at the United Nations headquarters.  

The project, spearheaded by the Indian government, has encountered some setbacks. Mr. Tuli's company will miss its first deadline of Dec. 31 to deliver an order of 100,000 tablets, meant for colleg e and graduate school students, to the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, the engineering institution in charge of the Aakash project. Datawind has delivered only about 14,000 tablets so far, and it recently received an extension until March 31 to supply the remaining tablets.

The 44-year-old Mr. Tuli, who pledged to make the tablet in India, talked about the difficulties in keeping up with the scale of the project and how his company can beat the prices of Chinese manufacturers in the tablet market. He also addressed recent news that Datawind shipped a batch of 10,000 tablets from China.

Here is an edited transcript of the conversation:

Q.

You had to ship 100,000 tablets to the government of India by Dec. 31. Are you on track to meet that deadline?

A.

No. Look , the project is not going to die if all 100,000 will not be there by the end of December. If we miss it by some quantity, they [the government] will decide how much they want. Their next stage in this project is five million units. Their target is to do 220 million units over five or six years to make sure every student in that country has a computing Internet device.

They are going to put out tenders, similar to what they did here. They put out a 100,000-unit tender, we won that tender and we are supplying that product.
There is version one and version two, and lots of muck in between. But they have held steadfast to the belief that they want a low-cost device and that they will bring their financial muscle to the table to procure and get pricing down to the level they want.

Q.

You got a warning note from the I.I.T. Bombay about the Dec. 31 delivery deadline. What are you doing about it?

A.

We are do ing the best we can.

Q.

What do you think realistically is the number you can deliver to them?

A.

I will have to see. This is not a sort of cliff that the project stops. Yes, they want it done as fast as possible. The ramifications of it should not be blown out of proportion. It is an artificial number, not relevant to the contract or terms of agreement or anything else. They wanted the 20,000 by the time they did the launch. Unfortunately, we were able to deliver only 12 or 13 [thousand].

One can jump up and down and get upset and say, “Oh, my God, they had to do 20 and they did only 13. These got kitted in China, oh, my God.”

It doesn't impact the reality on the ground. We are proud that these concepts started in India and they are going to use it to educate their kids. And we are adding as much Indian value-add as we reasonably can.

Except we are the only one in that whole realm who is pus hing for a made-in-India product. It is not a government requirement that it be a made-in-India product. Instead, it's something we have requested the government to specify in future tenders. They should specify an Indian value-addâ€"at least 25 percent is made in India, or at least 30 percent. That wasn't part of the specs and still is not.

The government's response to the recent three days' worth of brouhaha is: We placed an order on a vendor to supply a product - beyond that we don't care.

Q.

How are you able to make the product so cheaply?

A.

When you look at our bill of materials, we work at very low margins. No one else is in the industry is doing that. We have openly said what our business model is, focus on the recurring revenue stream: content, apps and so on. We are after a price-sensitive consumer, and to get to that we forgo most of our hardware margins.
It takes the Chinese supplier $42.85 to make it. I am telling you that I have a 5 percent margin and I make it for under $38, including the transportation, a 12-month warranty and the rest of it.

Q.

How is this possible?

A.

The only money left in this for us is the LCD and touchscreen. We make the touchscreen in Canada, and the LCD is packaged for us in South Korea. That's the margins we squeeze.

We tweak the reference design that is used in the industry for power management that's better for usâ€" we can use this chip that's cheaper and that chip that's cheaper and it meets our requirement, and we save a $1 or $1.50 in that area.

We make the touchscreen for $2. The Chinese also make it for $2 and sell it for $10.

Instead of us bringing 800 parts from 60 vendors, and doing the boards [motherboards] in India - which is what we did for the Aakash-1 and the Aakash-1.5 - for the sake of expediency for Aakash-2, getting those through lo gistics in India takes a lot of efforts. In China, they do the boards for 30-cent margins. I reduced the whole thing down to 12 parts and I kit it.

I told them, “I don't want you to assemble these.” I told them, “Some of these are going to the Indian government. For those, I want you to put them in a kit form in a box and I am going to bring it in that manner and process it. Later on, I will do more of it.” Contractually, legally, morally, it has no implication.

I am setting up a fab [fabrication unit] for making touch panels in Amritsar, India's first fab. Except for the fact that I am the one who has been wrapping myself around the Indian flag and saying this should be done, no one is asking for it. The government is not asking for it; the consumer is not saying, “I will only buy a made-in-India product.”

Q.

You talked up about setting up a fabrication unit - that's a large investment. What is the cost?

A.

Huge! Under 10 million [dollars]. It will make touchscreens. What we do with LCDs - we have guys in South Korea to package it for us.  They come in and do what they need to do and it goes in. We save $3 here. We maintain ourselves a 5 percent margin.

Q.

How are you able to finance this? There must be a lot of upfront cost.

A.

There are two aspects to it, the consumer side of it and the government side of it. When we did this originally, the government was trying to get a sub-$50 product. They put out two sets of tenders, then canceled those, but couldn't get a sub-$50 product. After setting standards for eligibility criteria that would only get the multinationals in, they said the multinationals are not willing to bid. So, they said, “Why don't we go out and put a tender where we reduce the criteria and say the company only had to be $5 million in revenue.”

All these little companies like us said this is an opportunity for us. We bid; we were significantly lower than the next guy.

On the government side, they give a letter of credit that gets transferred to factories and so on - that's how it gets funded.

When the publicity started, we put out a form for selling the commercial product online. In April-end, when we launched commercially, we had three million pre-bookings. Now we are at little over four million units. We said we'll deliver against whenever the product is ready. We are getting 600 to 1,000 pre-bookings every day. We deliver 2,500 to 3,000 a day, and we are still trying to catch up.

In the middle of that, we thought, if there are consumers that want to pay and are willing to pay, let's do that. Some started paying. Unfortunately, the scale of everything here has been beyond our imagination. In India, setting up an e-commerce facility takes time, so we thought we would have people sending us checks. Big mistake!

The po st office calls us up three, four days later. They said, “You have four boxes of checks.” Then we stopped it. We prioritize orders as they come in. We deal with our pre-bookings. We deliver them.

Some get extra upset that they weren't delivering on time. We offer refunds for those who don't want to wait. They will get a world-class product, I think, at a fraction of the price they would get otherwise.

Q.

What is your manufacturing experience like? Most of your team hasn't had experience making  tablets. Does that make it kind of challenging?

A.

What's given you the impression that our team doesn't have experience?  Let me explain our team: my brother alone has 78 patents. In the last 22 years, we have launched over 20 new electronic products. We were making the equivalent of a tablet with a 5-inch screen in 2002. For 10 years, we've been making devices in and around the tablet. We have made a series of netbooks and so on. Look up the product called PocketSurfer and see how far that goes.

Android tablets we may have been doing for only 18 months. We have experience making it. I challenge you to find somebody outside Samsung and LG, the large companies, in the same ballpark with the same depth of expertise that we do. Find me a guy who has a touchscreen facility and is making tablets on their own. The only one who is doing it is Samsung. None of my competitors in India do, Amazon doesn't, Apple doesn't.

Q.

What do you think India needs to do to improve its manufacturing of electronics?

A.

Reduce bureaucracy. Get some pride in what they do. India is a country where garment stores have a sign that says “export quality”â€"in every other country in the world that would be insulting. If foreigners need to buy it, it has to be good quality. Export quality is a sales pitch in India.  For them to make it in In dia, there should be an incentive for them to make it in India. If nothing else, local pride that it's made in India.

Q.

What have been the biggest hurdles with shipping the tablets to the government?  What would you have done differently in retrospect?

A.

It is a politically charged project that people take glee in demeaning. I don't know in the last 18 months what I could have done differently. The first contract stalled when I delivered 7,000 units and they said it couldn't sustain four inches of rain. Until today I haven't gotten paid.

I am creating a product at a lower price than anyone else in the world with the hope that it impacts people's lives and I make money out of it. I am not a charity. Nobody else in world is able to do it. I am getting crucified because they got kitted there [in China]. You know whatâ€"the brouhaha will be over in 48 hours and we will keep delivering the product.

Q.

At such low costs and low margins, are you running into any quality issues?

A.

Forty-dollar devices are not going to have Apple quality in there.  The Apple customer insists on a certain level of quality. To us, cost matters most than the balance.

A Conversation With: DataWind\'s Suneet Singh Tuli

Stan Honda/Agence France-Presse - Getty ImagesSuneet Singh Tuli.

Suneet Singh Tuli, the chief executive of DataWind, the company behind the $40 Aakash tablet, spoke to The New York Times in New York on Nov. 29, a day after the world's cheapest computer was unveiled by Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, at the United Nations headquarters.  

The project, spearheaded by the Indian government, has encountered some setbacks. Mr. Tuli's company will miss its first deadline of Dec. 31 to deliver an order of 100,000 tablets, meant for colleg e and graduate school students, to the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, the engineering institution in charge of the Aakash project. Datawind has delivered only about 14,000 tablets so far, and it recently received an extension until March 31 to supply the remaining tablets.

The 44-year-old Mr. Tuli, who pledged to make the tablet in India, talked about the difficulties in keeping up with the scale of the project and how his company can beat the prices of Chinese manufacturers in the tablet market. He also addressed recent news that Datawind shipped a batch of 10,000 tablets from China.

Here is an edited transcript of the conversation:

Q.

You had to ship 100,000 tablets to the government of India by Dec. 31. Are you on track to meet that deadline?

A.

No. Look , the project is not going to die if all 100,000 will not be there by the end of December. If we miss it by some quantity, they [the government] will decide how much they want. Their next stage in this project is five million units. Their target is to do 220 million units over five or six years to make sure every student in that country has a computing Internet device.

They are going to put out tenders, similar to what they did here. They put out a 100,000-unit tender, we won that tender and we are supplying that product.
There is version one and version two, and lots of muck in between. But they have held steadfast to the belief that they want a low-cost device and that they will bring their financial muscle to the table to procure and get pricing down to the level they want.

Q.

You got a warning note from the I.I.T. Bombay about the Dec. 31 delivery deadline. What are you doing about it?

A.

We are do ing the best we can.

Q.

What do you think realistically is the number you can deliver to them?

A.

I will have to see. This is not a sort of cliff that the project stops. Yes, they want it done as fast as possible. The ramifications of it should not be blown out of proportion. It is an artificial number, not relevant to the contract or terms of agreement or anything else. They wanted the 20,000 by the time they did the launch. Unfortunately, we were able to deliver only 12 or 13 [thousand].

One can jump up and down and get upset and say, “Oh, my God, they had to do 20 and they did only 13. These got kitted in China, oh, my God.”

It doesn't impact the reality on the ground. We are proud that these concepts started in India and they are going to use it to educate their kids. And we are adding as much Indian value-add as we reasonably can.

Except we are the only one in that whole realm who is pus hing for a made-in-India product. It is not a government requirement that it be a made-in-India product. Instead, it's something we have requested the government to specify in future tenders. They should specify an Indian value-addâ€"at least 25 percent is made in India, or at least 30 percent. That wasn't part of the specs and still is not.

The government's response to the recent three days' worth of brouhaha is: We placed an order on a vendor to supply a product - beyond that we don't care.

Q.

How are you able to make the product so cheaply?

A.

When you look at our bill of materials, we work at very low margins. No one else is in the industry is doing that. We have openly said what our business model is, focus on the recurring revenue stream: content, apps and so on. We are after a price-sensitive consumer, and to get to that we forgo most of our hardware margins.
It takes the Chinese supplier $42.85 to make it. I am telling you that I have a 5 percent margin and I make it for under $38, including the transportation, a 12-month warranty and the rest of it.

Q.

How is this possible?

A.

The only money left in this for us is the LCD and touchscreen. We make the touchscreen in Canada, and the LCD is packaged for us in South Korea. That's the margins we squeeze.

We tweak the reference design that is used in the industry for power management that's better for usâ€" we can use this chip that's cheaper and that chip that's cheaper and it meets our requirement, and we save a $1 or $1.50 in that area.

We make the touchscreen for $2. The Chinese also make it for $2 and sell it for $10.

Instead of us bringing 800 parts from 60 vendors, and doing the boards [motherboards] in India - which is what we did for the Aakash-1 and the Aakash-1.5 - for the sake of expediency for Aakash-2, getting those through lo gistics in India takes a lot of efforts. In China, they do the boards for 30-cent margins. I reduced the whole thing down to 12 parts and I kit it.

I told them, “I don't want you to assemble these.” I told them, “Some of these are going to the Indian government. For those, I want you to put them in a kit form in a box and I am going to bring it in that manner and process it. Later on, I will do more of it.” Contractually, legally, morally, it has no implication.

I am setting up a fab [fabrication unit] for making touch panels in Amritsar, India's first fab. Except for the fact that I am the one who has been wrapping myself around the Indian flag and saying this should be done, no one is asking for it. The government is not asking for it; the consumer is not saying, “I will only buy a made-in-India product.”

Q.

You talked up about setting up a fabrication unit - that's a large investment. What is the cost?

A.

Huge! Under 10 million [dollars]. It will make touchscreens. What we do with LCDs - we have guys in South Korea to package it for us.  They come in and do what they need to do and it goes in. We save $3 here. We maintain ourselves a 5 percent margin.

Q.

How are you able to finance this? There must be a lot of upfront cost.

A.

There are two aspects to it, the consumer side of it and the government side of it. When we did this originally, the government was trying to get a sub-$50 product. They put out two sets of tenders, then canceled those, but couldn't get a sub-$50 product. After setting standards for eligibility criteria that would only get the multinationals in, they said the multinationals are not willing to bid. So, they said, “Why don't we go out and put a tender where we reduce the criteria and say the company only had to be $5 million in revenue.”

All these little companies like us said this is an opportunity for us. We bid; we were significantly lower than the next guy.

On the government side, they give a letter of credit that gets transferred to factories and so on - that's how it gets funded.

When the publicity started, we put out a form for selling the commercial product online. In April-end, when we launched commercially, we had three million pre-bookings. Now we are at little over four million units. We said we'll deliver against whenever the product is ready. We are getting 600 to 1,000 pre-bookings every day. We deliver 2,500 to 3,000 a day, and we are still trying to catch up.

In the middle of that, we thought, if there are consumers that want to pay and are willing to pay, let's do that. Some started paying. Unfortunately, the scale of everything here has been beyond our imagination. In India, setting up an e-commerce facility takes time, so we thought we would have people sending us checks. Big mistake!

The po st office calls us up three, four days later. They said, “You have four boxes of checks.” Then we stopped it. We prioritize orders as they come in. We deal with our pre-bookings. We deliver them.

Some get extra upset that they weren't delivering on time. We offer refunds for those who don't want to wait. They will get a world-class product, I think, at a fraction of the price they would get otherwise.

Q.

What is your manufacturing experience like? Most of your team hasn't had experience making  tablets. Does that make it kind of challenging?

A.

What's given you the impression that our team doesn't have experience?  Let me explain our team: my brother alone has 78 patents. In the last 22 years, we have launched over 20 new electronic products. We were making the equivalent of a tablet with a 5-inch screen in 2002. For 10 years, we've been making devices in and around the tablet. We have made a series of netbooks and so on. Look up the product called PocketSurfer and see how far that goes.

Android tablets we may have been doing for only 18 months. We have experience making it. I challenge you to find somebody outside Samsung and LG, the large companies, in the same ballpark with the same depth of expertise that we do. Find me a guy who has a touchscreen facility and is making tablets on their own. The only one who is doing it is Samsung. None of my competitors in India do, Amazon doesn't, Apple doesn't.

Q.

What do you think India needs to do to improve its manufacturing of electronics?

A.

Reduce bureaucracy. Get some pride in what they do. India is a country where garment stores have a sign that says “export quality”â€"in every other country in the world that would be insulting. If foreigners need to buy it, it has to be good quality. Export quality is a sales pitch in India.  For them to make it in In dia, there should be an incentive for them to make it in India. If nothing else, local pride that it's made in India.

Q.

What have been the biggest hurdles with shipping the tablets to the government?  What would you have done differently in retrospect?

A.

It is a politically charged project that people take glee in demeaning. I don't know in the last 18 months what I could have done differently. The first contract stalled when I delivered 7,000 units and they said it couldn't sustain four inches of rain. Until today I haven't gotten paid.

I am creating a product at a lower price than anyone else in the world with the hope that it impacts people's lives and I make money out of it. I am not a charity. Nobody else in world is able to do it. I am getting crucified because they got kitted there [in China]. You know whatâ€"the brouhaha will be over in 48 hours and we will keep delivering the product.

Q.

At such low costs and low margins, are you running into any quality issues?

A.

Forty-dollar devices are not going to have Apple quality in there.  The Apple customer insists on a certain level of quality. To us, cost matters most than the balance.

Rape Victim Is Cremated in India After Six Are Charged With Murder

Saurabh Das/Associated Press

Indian protesters held candles during a rally in New Delhi on Saturday.

NEW DELHI - The body of a young woman who was raped in New Delhi this month by several men in a moving bus was brought home Sunday, a day after the police said that six men accused of attacking her had been charged with murder.

The body of the 23-year-old rape victim was transferred to the airport in Singapore on Saturday.

Airport security sources said the plane arrived from Singapore in the cargo area of Indira Gandhi International Airport at 4:15 a.m. Sunday and that the body was whisked away through the old domestic terminal. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi, president of the governing Congress party, received the body along with senior police officials amid growing public pressure on the government machinery.

The 23-year-old victim was cremated at a private ceremony in southwest New Delhi, the local news media reported. In attendance at the ceremony, which was closed to the news media, were family, friends and a handful of politicians. Sheila Dikshit, the chief minister of Delhi, who had been booed away by protesters at Jantar Mantar on Saturday, was spotted leaving the crematorium, a Reuters report said. There was heavy police deployment during the funeral.

On Saturday a police spokesman, Rajan Bhagat, said that the six would be charged with murder. If convicted, they could face the death penalty in the Dec. 16 attack, which shocked India because of its savagery, led to violent protests and prompted demands for improved protection for women as well as calls for the death penalty in rape cases.

The country's Supreme Court ruled in 1980 that the death penalty should be used only in the “rarest of rare” cases, and fewer than 50 people have been executed since India's independence in 1947.

The woman, who has not been identified, has become a symbol for the treatment of women in India, where sexual harassment and assault are believed to be widespread and conviction rates for the crimes are low. She boarded a bus with a male friend after watching a movie at a mall, and was raped and attacked with an iron rod by the men, who the police later said had been drinking and were on a “joy ride.”

She died Saturday morning in Singapore, where she had been flown for treatment for the severe internal injuries caused by the assault. She had an infection in her lungs and abdomen, liver damage and a brain injury, the Singapore hospital said, and died from organ failure.

As news of her death spread Saturday, India's young, social-network-using population began to organize protests and candlelight vigils in places like the western city of Cochin in Kerala, the outsourcing hub of Bangalore and New Delhi, the capital. Just a tiny sliver of India's population can afford a computer or has access to the Internet, but the young, educated subset of this group has become increasingly galvanized over the New Delhi rape case.

Late Saturday afternoon, thousands of people, most of them men, filled Jantar Mantar, an observatory and popular protest ground in New Delhi, where they waved placards and shouted slogans. When Ms. Dikshit arrived there in the early afternoon surrounded by a police escort, she was booed, heckled and jostled by the crowd. Ms. Dikshit, a diminutive 74-year-old, stayed only a few minutes, lighting a candle and holding her hands together in prayer. She did not speak to the crowd.

As darkness fell here in New Delhi, the crowd at Jantar Mantar lighted hundreds of candles. People trickled in and out of Jantar Mantar late into Saturday night - chanting, singing, mourning silently, praying and performing Hindu rituals around a fire.

Upamanyu Raju, 21, a student at Delhi University who attended the Jantar Mantar protest, said he had been protesting since a day after the rape victim was admitted to the hospital because of the “utter atrocity of what happened.”

Mr. Raju said he had given his younger sister pepper spray and a Swiss Army knife, but he worried that those things would not protect her. “It's wrong to stop girls from going out” of the house, he said, but there is little choice because the city is so unsafe for women. According to a 2010 survey, more than a third of the women questioned in New Delhi said they had been physically sexually harassed in the previous year, but less than 1 percent reported the assault to the police.

The roads leading to India Gate, the site of earlier protests that had turned violent, were barricaded by the police early Saturday, and nearby subway stations were closed. More than 40 police units were deployed in the area, including 28 units of the Central Reserve Police Force, which are national anti-insurgency troops.

In South Delhi, hundreds of students from Jawaharlal Nehru University organized a silent march on Saturday from their campus to Munirka, the bus stop where the rape victim was picked up. The crowd of protesters trudged along a busy road, a few holding hastily made placards with phrases like “You are an inspiration to us all.”

On Saturday morning, Prime Minister Singh expressed his “deepest condolences” to the family of the victim, who was a physiotherapy student.

“We have already seen the emotions and energies this incident has generated,” he said in a statement. “It would be a true homage to her memory if we are able to channelize these emotions and energies into a constructive course of action.” The government, he said, is examining “the penal provisions that exist for such crimes and measures to enhance the safety and security of women.”

And Ms. Gandhi, India's most powerful female politician, made a rare televised statement that was broadcast Saturday.

“As a woman, and mother, I understand how protesters feel,” she said. “Today we pledge that the victim will get justice,” she said.

Even larger protests were planned for later Sunday, protesters in Delhi said, including a so-called March for Freedom from the Delhi University subway station.

Niharika Mandhana contributed reporting.

A version of this article appeared in print on December 31, 2012, in The International Herald Tribune.

Rape Incites Women to Fight Culture in India

Indian Women March: ‘That Girl Could Have Been Any One of Us'

Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

A candlelight gathering after the cremation on Sunday blocked a road in New Delhi, the city where the Dec. 16 rape occurred.

NEW DELHI - Neha Kaul Mehra says she was only 7 years old the first time she was sexually harassed. She was walking to a dance class in an affluent neighborhood of New Delhi when a man confronted her and began openly masturbating.

Police officers stood guard outside a cremation center in New Delhi on Sunday before the arrival of the body of a 23-year-old woman who was fatally beaten by a group of rapists on a bus.

That episode was far from the last. Years of verbal and physical sexual affronts left Ms. Mehra, now 29, filled with what she described as “impotent rage.”

Last week, she and thousands of Indian women like her poured that anger into public demonstrations, reacting to news of the gang rape of another young woman who had moved to the city from a small village, with a new life in front of her.

That woman, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student, died Saturday from internal injuries inflicted with a metal rod during the rape, which took place on a bus two weeks ago.

In her story and its brutal ending, many women in the world's largest democracy say they see themselves.

“That girl could have been any one of us,” said Sangeetha Saini, 44, who took her two teenage daughters to a candle-filled demonstration on Sunday in Delhi. Women in India “face harassment in public spaces, streets, on buses,” she said. “We can only tackle this by becoming Durga,” she added, referring to the female Hindu god who slays a demon.

Indian women have made impressive gains in recent years: maternal mortality rates have dropped, literacy rates and education levels have risen, and millions of women have joined the professional classes. But the women at the heart of the protest movement say it was born of their outraged realization that no matter how accomplished they become, or how hard they work, women here will never fully take part in the promise of a new and more prosperous India unless something fundamental about the culture changes.

Indeed, many women in India say they are still subject to regular harassment and assault during the day and are fearful of leaving their homes alone after dark. Now they are demanding that the government, and a police force that they say offers women little or no protection, do something about it.

Ankita Cheerakathil, 20, a student at St. Stephen's College who attended a protest on Thursday, remembered dreading the daily bus ride when she was in high school in the southern state of Kerala. Before she stepped outside her house, she recalled, she would scrutinize herself in a mirror, checking to see whether her blouse was too tight. At the bus stop, inevitably, men would zero in on the schoolgirls in their uniforms, some as young as 10, to leer and make cracks filled with sexual innuendo.

“This is not an isolated incident,” Ms. Cheerakathil said of the death of the New Delhi rape victim. “This is the story of every Indian woman.”

While the Dec. 16 attack was extreme in its savagery, gang rapes of women have been happening with frightening regularity in recent months, particularly in northern India. Critics say the response from a mostly male police force is often inadequate at best.

Last week, an 18-year-old woman in Punjab State committed suicide by drinking poison after being raped by two men and then humiliated by male police officers, who made her describe her attack in detail several times, then tried to encourage her to marry one of her rapists. Dozens more gang rapes have been reported in the states of Haryana, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in recent months.

The government does not keep statistics on gang rape, but over all, rapes increased 25 percent from 2006 to 2011. More than 600 rapes were reported in New Delhi alone in 2012. So far, only one attack has resulted in a conviction.

Sociologists and crime experts say the attacks are the result of deeply entrenched misogynistic attitudes and the rising visibility of women, underpinned by long-term demographic trends in India.

After years of aborting female fetuses, a practice that is still on the rise in some areas because of a cultural preference for male children, India has about 15 million “extra” men between the ages of 15 and 35, the range when men are most likely to commit crimes. By 2020, those “extra” men will have doubled to 30 million.

“There is a strong correlation between masculinized sex ratios and higher rates of violent crime against women,” said Valerie M. Hudson, a co-author of “Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia's Surplus Male Population.” Men who do not have wives and families often gather in packs, Ms. Hudson argues, and then commit more gruesome and violent crimes than they would on their own.

Reporting was contributed by Malavika Vyawahare, Anjani Trivedi, Niharika Mandhana and Saritha Rai.

A version of this article appeared in print on December 31, 2012, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Indian Women March: ‘That Girl Could Have Been Any One of Us'.

From Montreal, DataWind Says Aakash Not Main Focus

Christinne Muschi for The New York TimesRaja Singh Tuli, co-chairman and chief technology officer of DataWind, holding a UbiSlate tablet in his office in Montreal, Canada on  Dec. 4.

A somewhat shabby former newspaper office in downtown Montreal seems an improbable place to make components for an ultralow-cost tablet computer for Indian students.

But behind an unmarked door on the ground floor there is indeed a fully functional, if cramped and somewhat makeshift, factory producing touch screens for India's Aakash tablet and its slightly more deluxe commercial counterpart, UBiSlate 7+. Sweeping a hand toward the operation's clean room, Raja Singh Tuli, co-founder of DataWind, boasts that Samsung is the only other tablet maker that produces its own touchscreens.

While that is probably true, it is also indisputable that DataWind and O.L.A. Display, its touchscreen subsidiary, are not Samsung. While Mr. Tuli and his younger brother, Suneet, have captured the world's attention with the Aakash, a visit to the Montreal facility makes it clear that setting up production in India to make the tablet has proved to be a far greater challenge than obtaining the contract for the first 100,000 units.

Indeed when the elder Mr. Tuli used a whiteboard in the plant's “board room” - which features an exceptionally mismatched selection of office chairs and a “Star Wars” poster - to outline the company's plans, he insisted that Aakash is not the main focus of DataWind even if it has become the source of the company's fame. (Read more about the Aakash project and the problems it has faced.)

“I'll tell you the reason why we're here,” Mr. Tuli said, with an orange marker in hand. “It's not to give the Indian government low-cost units. That's not why we're here. We got stuck in it; we're doing our best.”

The company's real goal, according to Mr. Tuli, is “to supply low-cost Internet to the masses in India and Africa.”

But to get there, the Tuli brothers must first meet their commitment to the Indian government, one that is dramatically behind schedule. DataWind is required to supply the government with 100,000 tablets by the end of this month. But the elder Mr. Tuli estimated that it has only shipped 20,000 units to date (Indian Institute of Technology Bombay said last week that only 14,000 had been delivered). While he expects to double that total by the end of the year, he does not anticipate fulfilling the contract until March.

At the same time DataWind must overcome two broad issues surrounding the $60 retail version of its tablet, which comes packaged with unlimited Internet access for $2 a month in India. Not only is the company extraordinarily behind on filling orders for that model - which Mr. Tuli estimates now number 4 million - it now must offset a perception among some Indian consumers that it is an inferior device.

Mr. Tuli said that he was among those at the company and on its board who initially opposed his younger brother's plan to bid on the government contract.

“I can tell you there was a lot of discussion about this at first because we never intended to become a hardware manufacturer,” he said. But ultimately, Mr. Tuli said, that the company's board was persuaded that by removing the wireless modem from the $60 tablet, DataWind could provide a dev ice within the government's price and still make money.

Doing that, however, and assembling the device in India, Mr. Tuli said, has proven to be much harder than DataWind anticipated.

“Listen, it's obviously easier in China just because the whole infrastructure is set up, capital is so much cheaper,” he said. “In India, it can be done but the process is longer. The whole infrastructure for manufacturing just isn't set up.”

Although Mr. Tuli said that DataWind long ago lined up five companies in India to assemble its tablets, the first of them will not start for at least two to three more weeks. In the interim, the company has turned to Chinese manufacturers and even hand-assembled 10,000 tablets for the government at one of its offices in India.

He also cited bureaucratic delays. Mr. Tuli said it was common for the touchscreens from Montreal and other components from China to be held up by Indian customs for a month or longer.

Despite al l of that, Mr. Tuli said that DataWind is making a slim profit from the tablets it has produced for the government. Both Tuli brothers, in separate interviews, insisted that the downtown Montreal touchscreen operation plays a key role in that.

The rise of smartphones and tablets globally, the elder Mr. Tuli said, has allowed Chinese, Korean and Taiwanese manufacturers to charge premium prices for touchscreens, creating an opening in Canada for production.

Christinne Muschi for The New York TimesThe assembly room at the facilities of DataWind in Montreal on Dec. 4.

The small plant in Montreal is divided into two distinct operations. One side turns sheets of glass into eight touchscreen sensors using semiconductor fabrication technologies. Mr. Tuli said that part of the operation employs a unique process, which he declined to detail, that make it a lower-cost producer than even plants in China.

But Mr. Tuli acknowledged that the other side of the plant - where three shifts of eight workers take the glass panels and then assemble them into screens - is not globally competitive because of its labor costs. He plans to move that portion of the operation, which involves considerable manual labor, largely to India.

Even with more Indian production, however, Mr. Tuli acknowledged that DataWind is unlikely to beat the Chinese when it comes to production costs in the long run.

“It is possible that a year or two down the road the Chinese will be able to undercut us,” he said. “We don't claim to have anything special in making low-cost units forever.”

DataWind's operations in Montreal show no signs of extravagance. At another office in the touristy Old Montreal neighborhood where Datawind designs its tablets and develops its software, a test engineer showed off a test rig containing half a dozen prototypes. He had built it out of a Federal Express shipping box.

As for Indian consumers who complain that the touchscreens on their tablets are unresponsive and generally inferior, Mr. Tuli blamed the Indian government. Its contract, he said, required DataWind to use resistive touchpads, an older technology better suited for simple tasks like operating ATM machines. Several months ago, Mr. Tuli said, DataWind switched all of its models to the more sensitive capacitive touch screens, the standard on most tablets and smartphones.

“The fact is, a resistive touch pad is not that responsive,” Mr. Tuli said. “But we did it based on their spec.”
Mr. Tuli declined to comment when asked if agreeing to supply the government had been a mistake in retros pect. Nor would he say whether DataWind intends to bid on future supply contracts.

But he insisted that DataWind is committed to expanding tablet production in India to promote its Internet service. It relies on servers in Canada to strip down and compress Web pages so that they can they can be downloaded within an acceptable amount of time over India's old and very slow wireless network.

“We're not going to give up because of these little issues,” he said.

However, back at the other office, Mr. Tuli did point out an engineer who was translating manuals for companies assembling DataWind tablets in China. And a couple of very crowded desks over, a hardware engineer showed how DataWind's electronic components are designed to snap into standard Chinese tablet cases.

When asked how difficult the Indian experience has been, Mr. Tuli, who speaks at a rapid-fire pace, paused momentarily.

“We're committed to it,” he said, “But always in life i t's tougher than you think it was going to be.”

Portrait Emerges of Victim in New Delhi Gang Rape

Raveendran/Agence France-Presse - Getty ImagesDemonstrators lit candles Monday in memory of a gang rape victim in New Delhi.

She was studious, mild-mannered and about to be married.

Her parents had sold off land and scrimped on food to pay for her and her brothers' education. She came to India's capital to pursue dreams of being a doctor, from a tiny farming village that regularly suffered drought and floods.

Details about the life of the 23-year-old New Delhi gang rape victim, who died on Saturday, began to trickle out over the weekend, as relatives and neighbors spoke publicly for the first time since the woman was rap ed by several men in a moving bus, assaulted with an iron rod and dumped on the side of a highway.

For nearly two weeks, as she battled for life, first at a hospital in New Delhi and then in Singapore, hundreds of Indians poured onto the streets in angry protests praying for her demanding justice. On Sunday, as the victim was cremated in a private ceremony in New Delhi, a picture emerged of her life, her family and her dreams. Her name has not been disclosed.

From a Hindu family of modest means, the victim, who was studying physiotherapy, was a “brilliant” and “hard working” student who had doggedly pursued a medical education. “She had made up her mind very early that she wanted to become a doctor,” The Hindu newspaper quoted Lalji Singh, who said he was the victim's uncle.

The victim's parents had moved to New Delhi from a small town called Ballia in Uttar Pradesh, among hundreds of Indians who migrate to large Indian cities in search of a better future for their children. Her father worked as a loader with a private airline at New Delhi's international airport, according to The Hindustan Times.

He had invested heavily in his children's education, even selling his ancestral property, “so that their aspirations could be fulfilled,” Mr. Singh was quoted as saying. Her father always encouraged her to shine in life, and, unlike many traditional families who save first for their daughter's marriage, he spared no expense for her education, the Times of India said.

Her father's sacrifices sparked in the victim a determination to succeed at an early age. As a teenager, she reportedly gave lessons to younger children to supplement the household income. A role model for those in her neighborhood, her parents hoped her two younger siblings would emulate her. She was determined to start earning so she could repay her father, Indian media reported.

On Sunday evening, reports suggested that the victim was preparing for her marriage in February. “They had made all the wedding preparations and had planned a wedding party in Delhi,” Agence France-Presse quoted Meena Rai, who said she had accompanied the victim on shopping trips.

At Delhi Protest Ground, Talk of Causes Behind Violence Against Women

Anjani Trivedi for The New York TimesA candlelight vigil at Jantar Mantar, Delhi, on Saturday.

The body of the 23-year-old victim of a fatal gang rape in New Delhi this month was returned to India from Singapore early Sunday, as calls for government action and protests in response to the attack continued to rouse people across India.

Airport security sources say the plane arrived in the cargo area of New Delhi International Airport at 4:15 a.m. and that the body was whisked away through the old domestic terminal, known as the Palam side.  Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi, president of the governing Congress party, received the body along w ith senior police officials amid growing public pressure on the government machinery.

Later in the morning, her family held a private ceremony at a crematorium in southwest New Delhi, the local news media reported. In attendance at the ceremony, which was closed to the news media, were family, friends and a handful of politicians. Sheila Dikshit, the chief minister of Delhi who was booed away by protesters at Jantar Mantar on Saturday, was spotted leaving the crematorium, a Reuters report said. There was heavy police deployment at the crematorium during the funeral.

People trickled in and out of Jantar Mantar late into Saturday night â€" chanting, singing, mourning silently, praying and performing Hindu rituals around a fire.

The crowds had visibly thinned since the morning, and groups sat in circles at the popular central Delhi protest spot. Even leaving aside the police officers and all-male riot squads, a large part of the gathering was men, young and old.

The attack on the unidentified young woman, a medical student who died at a Singapore hospital on Saturday after being gang-raped Dec. 16 on a moving bus in Delhi, has led to calls for tougher laws and better policing to prevent violence against women in India. It is also prompting deeper discussions about the root causes of an apparent increase in this violence.

One young man, who came to Jantar Mantar with his 54-year-old mother, said the problem in India is in the numbers. “There are too many people in this country â€" 1.3 billion,” said Shekhar Mahajan, 34. “Life becomes a struggle and it's the survival of the fittest here. There is growing frustration and economic disparities.†

Mr. Mahajan, a consultant based in Delhi, said that while female beauty is appreciated worldwide, lechery is explicit in India.  This, he said, is rooted in inequality and a lack of social awareness.

Anjali Tripathi, 38, a homemaker, said that problems begin at home. “From the very grass-root, the mothers have to educate their sons,” she said. Mrs. Tripathi said she brought her teenage daughter to the protests, to try to “educate her” about rape.

Many, like Mrs. Tripathi, came to Jantar Mantar with their families. Other women at the protest shared her view and emphasized the importance of strengthening value systems and ridding Indian households of gender biases.

Men spoke instead of frustration and envy. “This is a conservative society. There is sexual repression,” Amit Bagani, 32, said as he observed a group of silent mourners, who refused to speak to anyone.

A friend of Mr. Bagani's, Amul Vitthal, also 32, said, “Our society is divided into a thousand classes, there are huge disparities â€" like mentality and access to money â€" between these classes, but all these layers intermingle with each other with very different mind-sets.”

Both Mr. Bagani and Mr. Vitthal said that general lawlessness in the country, which allows people to commit crimes without fear of punishment, played a part.

The peaceful protest also saw some explicit Indian themes. A large group huddled around a man performing a ritualistic hawan, or prayer fire, and loudly chanting mantras. As protesters brought pieces of broken plywood to fuel the fire, he urged everyone to chant the common Gayatri Mantra and join in.

Rings of people shouted slogans like “We Want Justice” and “Vande Mataram” (Hail to the Motherland, a famous slogan from the freedom movement).  Some brought musical instruments, while others offered hot tea to the people who had decided to stay out on a winter night.

“We will suff er,” said Mr. Bagani. “This is our generation.”

The Taboo of Menstruation

Bettiah, India

KHUSHI knew it was cancer. Ankita thought she was injured. None of the girls knew why they were suddenly bleeding, why their stomachs were “paining,” as Indian English has it. They cried and were terrified and then they asked their mothers. And their mothers said, you are normal. You are menstruating. You are a woman now.

But that is not all. The girls, whose names I've changed here for the sake of their privacy, were also told: when you menstruate, don't cook food because you will pollute it. Don't touch idols because you will defile them. Don't handle pickles because they will go rotten with your touch.

Pickles, I asked Ankita? Yes, madam, she told me, in her schoolyard in rural Uttar Pradesh. My mother says it is so. Her mother believed it, and her mother before her. It must be true.

I read of another girl who said that her nail polish had spoiled because she had applied it during her period. She saw nothing weird about this.

I met Ankita and her peers in November, while accompanying a sanitation and hygiene carnival, the Great Wash Yatra, which has traveled a thousand miles across rural India. The aim of the Yatra, organized by a nonprofit called WASH United, is to spread the right messages about health and hygiene - do not defecate in the open, wash your hands with soap after the toilet and before eating - using singing, dancing, games and support from cricket players and Bollywood stars. The tactic works: all of its stalls have queues of men and boys waiting to play. All except one: a curtained tent, where only women are allowed.

This is the Menstrual Hygiene Management Lab, where girls and women can come to learn how to safely make and maintain cloth sanitary napkins (use clean cloth; dry it in the sun; iron it to remove moisture) as well as for something even more revolutionary: to talk frankly about periods.

The taboo of menstruation in India causes real harm. Women in some tribes are forced to live in a cowshed throughout their periods. There are health issues, like infections caused by using dirty rags, and horror stories, like that of one girl who was too embarrassed to ask her mother for a clean cloth, and used one she found without knowing it had lizard eggs in it. According to one of the Yatra outreach workers, the subsequent infection meant her uterus had to be removed when she was 13. She would be forever tainted as a barren woman, so that whoever saw her first in the morning had to take a bath to wash her stain away.

But beyond superstition and discrimination, many Indian women face the straightforward lack of clean, safe lavatory facilities. Back in my high school in England, we may have been embarrassed by our periods, as most girls are, but we had clean bathroom stalls in which to change our sanitary pads in privacy, and trash bins in which to throw them.

Many students in India, where around 650 million people still lack toilets, can't say the same. Most schools I visited had filthy latrines, used only because there was no alternative. Some had none at all. Students and teachers made do with fields and back alleys.

Concentrating on lessons when you are desperate for the bathroom is hard on anyone. It's nearly impossible for a girl who is menstruating and has nowhere to change or dispose of her pad. Girls grow tired of dealing with it. Often their families encourage them to stay home from school and get married. In one survey, 23 percent of Indian school-age girls dropped out of school when they reached puberty.

“Girls suffer if they aren't empowered to manage their menstrual cycle without pain and shame each month,” said Chris Williams, the executive director of the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council, which runs the Menstrual Hygiene Management Lab. “Their health, schooling and dignity are in the balance.” And the world suffers, too: educated women are healthier, have smaller families, often earn more and have a positive impact on development.

It can take years, even generations, to change a taboo. But anecdotally, outreach workers note that the only girls who don't believe the superstitions about menstruation are those with educated mothers. So the best way to change the minds of future women is to keep girls in school today, and basic lavatory facilities are one of the easiest ways to do that.

Back in Ankita's schoolyard, something revolutionary was happening. Although many male teachers in rural India are terrified that broaching the subject of menstruation will be considered inappropriate or worse, one of Ankita's teachers was different. After attending a Yatra outreach session, he used 200 rupees (less than $4) of his own money to turn a disused latrine into a simple incinerator, which girls could use to burn their dirty cloths.

It isn't perfect: girls still face the embarrassment of going to the incinerator with everyone knowing why. But this rudimentary construction, with its vent made from a discarded well-water pump, could have huge consequences. Not only could it bring educational salvation to Ankita and her classmates, but a better future for generations to come.

Rose George is the author of “The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters.”

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on December 29, 2012, on page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: The Taboo of Menstruation.

Weak Response of Indian Government in Rape Case Stokes Rage

Leaders' Response Magnifies Outrage in India Rape Case

Anupam Nath/Associated Press

Students in Guwahati, India, mourned the death of a rape victim on Saturday with a silent vigil; elsewhere, anger seethed.

NEW DELHI - India often seems to careen from crisis to crisis, with protests regularly spilling onto the streets over the latest outrage or scandal, a nation seemingly always on the boil. But when things settle, as they inevitably do, little seems to change. Public anger usually cools to a simmer.

Now, though, the heat has turned up again, as the death early on Saturday of a young woman savagely assaulted and raped here in the national capital has mushroomed into a new and volatile moment of crisis that has touched a deep chord of discontent. Protests that began more than a week ago as anguished cries against sexual violence in Indian society have broadened into angry condemnations of a government whose response has seemed tone deaf and, at times, incompetent.

On Saturday, hours after the rape victim died at a hospital in Singapore, several thousand people gathered at Jantar Mantar, the designated protest spot in the center of the capital, to express their anguish and rage. The latest demonstrations followed a week that saw the authorities clash with protesters and cordon off the political center of the city with a huge display of force.

“What the government is doing is politically stupid,” said Jayati Ghosh, a professor of economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, speaking during a protest last week. “This will cause public disaffection, because people are seeing the government as inflexible and intolerant. If the government listened, they would find that people are trying to find solutions.

“The problem,” she added, “is the government is not even listening.”

For much of last week, as some protesters complained that the Indian state was more interested in protecting itself than its citizens, especially women, the symbolism has been stark: the authorities invoked emergency policing laws, closing off the governmental center of the capital, blockading roads and even shutting down subway stations - a democratic government temporarily encircling itself with a moat. At one point, fire hoses were turned on college students.

Those restrictions were eased by Dec. 25, even as New Delhi remained consumed by an anxious vigil as the young woman remained in critical condition. Doctors gave daily, televised updates on her condition until Wednesday evening, when the authorities unexpectedly flew her by special airplane to a hospital in Singapore, where her condition deteriorated before she died of organ failure.

It is the graphic horror of the attack that set off the outrage: the victim was a 23-year-old woman, her identity still withheld, whose evening at the movies with a male friend on Dec. 16 turned nightmarish. The police say a group of drunken men waved the pair onto a private bus, promising a ride home, but instead assaulted them with an iron rod and raped the woman as the bus moved through the city.

College students, mostly women, led the early protests. Sexual violence has become a national scandal in India, amid regular reports of gang rapes and other assaults against infants, teenagers and other women. But women also spoke of a more pervasive form of harassment: of being groped in public; of fearing to ride buses or subways alone; of victims, not attackers, being shamed and blamed.

“Rape happens everywhere,” Urvashi Butalia, a feminist writer, wrote in The Hindu, a national English-language newspaper. “It happens inside homes, in families, in neighborhoods, in police stations, in towns and cities, in villages, and its incidence increases, as is happening in India, as society goes through change, as women's roles begin to change, as economies slow down and the slice of the pie becomes smaller.”

Analysts say that India's coalition national government, led by the Indian National Congress Party, had an early opportunity to defuse the anger by embracing the protests and providing comfort and reassurance. Yet that moment, analysts agree, was missed, as top leaders misjudged how quickly public anger would escalate, especially among the young. It was a generational divide between young urbanites, often communicating by social media, and a government unable to find a way to win public trust.

Reassurances offered by Sonia Gandhi, president of the Congress Party, came off as unconvincing. Her son Rahul Gandhi, the party's heir apparent, has barely been visible.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh first attempted to calm the situation last Monday with a taped national address, but his speech was overshadowed by a stray remark. At the end of the taping, Mr. Singh, speaking in Hindi, asked “Theek hai?” meaning “Is it all right?”

It was most likely an innocuous comment to the cameraman that ordinarily would have been edited out. But it quickly went viral and became a bitter rallying cry on social media. That was followed by a sexist comment about female protesters by a member of Parliament, who also happened to be the son of India's president.

When the protests grew angrier and more violent, especially as men joined the ranks, many reportedly allied with rival political parties, the police responded with fire hoses, tear gas and nightsticks. Then the authorities invoked the emergency policing law, known as Section 144, to lock down the area around the presidential palace, Parliament and the main government offices.

But if the government's heavy-handed response met with broad criticism, the hard line taken by some protesters also raised concerns. Frustrated, many protesters called for the death penalty against convicted rapists, alarming many people in a country where executions are extremely rare.

Then a police constable died of a heart attack during the protests. The authorities say he had a seizure after being attacked by protesters - a claim denied by some witnesses.

“Collectively, we seem to have unthinkingly bought into a narrative of empowered indignation in which ‘anger' against ‘authority' is deemed to be just and justifiable and any means to vent that ‘anger' is rationalized as socially acceptable and politically correct,” Harish Khare, a former spokesman for the prime minister, wrote in The Hindu.

The constable's death seemed to shift the tenor of the public mood, and Mr. Singh made another speech calling for calm and promising action. “The emergence of women in public spaces, which is an absolutely essential part of social emancipation, is accompanied by growing threats to their safety and security,” he said. “We must reflect on this problem, which occurs in all states and regions of our country, and which requires greater attention.”

On Saturday morning, many of the people gathered at Jantar Mantar, shouting “We want justice,” were determined that the protests should remain peaceful. Neha Sharma, 24, a student at Delhi University, said capital punishment was not the solution but that reforms were needed in the criminal justice system. “We need to fix the system,” she said. “Neither the government nor the police are taking any steps.”

Protesters have repeatedly called for reforms, citing the frequent insensitivity of the police and the courts toward women and the skewed priorities of a government that devotes thousands of officers to protecting politicians and other so-called V.V.I.P.'s, even as departments too often fail to protect ordinary citizens. “I'm now beginning to feel that my government is not capable of understanding the situation, let alone solving it,” said Abhijit Sarkar, 28, a social activist who participated in a candlelight vigil last week. “During the candlelight vigil, policemen were actually laughing at us.”

Niharika Mandhana and Sruthi Gottipati contributed reporting.

A version of this news analysis appeared in print on December 30, 2012, on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Shaky Response of India's Government in Fatal Rape Case Magnifies Outrage.

Woman Accused of Hate-Crime Murder in Subway Push

A 31-year-old woman was arrested on Saturday and charged with second-degree murder as a hate crime in connection with the death of a man who was pushed onto the tracks of an elevated subway station in Queens and crushed by an oncoming train.

Erika Menendez, 31, charged with second-degree murder as a hate crime, was led out of the 112th Precinct in Queens on Saturday.

Suspect in Subway Killing Close Video See More Videos '

Police personnel patrolling the 40th Street-Lowery Street station on Friday, where a man was pushed in front of a 7 train.

The woman, Erika Menendez, selected her victim because she believed him to be a Muslim or a Hindu, Richard A. Brown, the Queens district attorney, said.

“The defendant is accused of committing what is every subway commuter's nightmare: Being suddenly and senselessly pushed into the path of an oncoming train,” Mr. Brown said in an interview.

In a statement, Mr. Brown quoted Ms. Menendez, “in sum and substance,” as having told the police: “I pushed a Muslim off the train tracks because I hate Hindus and Muslims ever since 2001 when they put down the twin towers I've been beating them up.” Ms. Menendez conflated the Muslim and Hindu faiths in her comments to the police and in her target for attack, officials said.

The victim, Sunando Sen, was born in India and, according to a roommate, was raised Hindu.

Mr. Sen “was allegedly shoved from behind and had no chance to defend himself,” Mr. Brown said. “Beyond that, the hateful remarks allegedly made by the defendant and which precipitated the defendant's actions should never be tolerated by a civilized society.”

Mr. Brown said he had no information on the defendant's criminal or mental history.

“It will be up to the court to determine if she is fit to stand trial,” he said.

Ms. Menendez is expected to be arraigned by Sunday morning. If convicted, she faces a maximum penalty of life in prison. By charging her with murder as a hate crime, the possible minimum sentence she faced would be extended to 20 years from 15 years, according to prosecutors.

On Saturday night, Ms. Menendez, wearing a dark blue hooded sweatshirt, was escorted from the 112th Precinct to a waiting car by three detectives. Greeted by camera flashes and dozens of reporters, she let out a loud, unintelligible moan. She did not respond to reporters' questions.

The attack occurred around 8 p.m. on Thursday at the 40th Street-Lowery Street station in Sunnyside.

Mr. Sen, 46, was looking out over the tracks when a woman approached him from behind and shoved him onto the tracks, according to the police. Mr. Sen never saw her, the police said.

 The woman fled the station, running down two flights of stairs and down the street.

 By the next morning, a brief and grainy black-and-white video of the woman who the police said was behind the attack was being broadcast on news programs.

Patrol officers picked up Ms. Menendez early Saturday after someone who had seen the video on television spotted her on a Brooklyn street and called 911, said Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the Police Department. She was taken to Queens and later placed in lineups, according to detectives. Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said on Friday that, according to witnesses' accounts, there had been no contact on the subway platform between the attacker and the victim before the shove.

The case was the second this month involving someone being pushed to death in a train station. In the first case, Ki-Suck Han, 58, of Elmhurst, Queens, died under the Q train at the 49th Street and Seventh Avenue station on Dec. 3. Naeem Davis, 30, was charged with second-degree murder in that case.

Mr. Sen, after years of saving money, had opened a small copying business on the Upper West Side this year.

Ar Suman, a Muslim, and one of three roommates who shared a small first-floor apartment with Mr. Sen in Elmhurst, said he and Mr. Sen often discussed religion.

Though they were of different faiths, Mr. Suman said, he admired the respect that Mr. Sen showed for those who saw the world differently than he did. Mr. Suman said he once asked Mr. Sen why he was not more active in his faith and it resulted in a long philosophical discussion.

“He was so gentle,” Mr. Suman said. “He said in this world a lot of people are dying, killing over religious things.”

Reporting was contributed by William K. Rashbaum, Wendy Ruderman, Jeffrey E. Singer and Julie Turkewitz. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

A version of this article appeared in print on December 30, 2012, on page A15 of the New York edition with the headline: Woman Is Charged With Murder as a Hate Crime in a Fatal Subway Push.