Vineet Srivastava is an assistant teacher at the Khairahna Primary School in Uttar Pradesh's Raebareli district. In his village, child marriage used to be a common practice for the girls in the past, but now they have started studying. He is sharing how this was made possible.

The curious case of a submerged idol of Narayan Goswami deity in Odisha's Jajpur is ridden with intriguing events from the state's medieval history. The idol was submerged in a temple's pond in 1569 to protect it from an invading army commanded by an estranged Hindu general who converted to Islam in order to marry a Muslim princess. On every Odia new year ever since, the idol has been taken out of the pond for worship and submerged back — a ritual that hadn't been observed for the last two years due to restrictions arising from the COVID-19 pandemic. Read on to know more about the historical origins of the ritual.

ASHA worker Annapoorna Singh is afflicted with polio and that is what gives her the drive to ensure children who come under her care in Kanpur, are inoculated on time. She also counsels parents about the importance of polio vaccines and helps with institutional deliveries.

Tribal men in East Singhbhum district make an annual pilgrimage into the Dalma forests to gather forest produce. Their women practise temporary 'widowhood' and pray to Singhbhonga, their deity. Sendra, say villagers, is a way of sharing knowledge of forest produce and rare herbs with their younger generation.

Bihar is India’s most flood-prone state and recurring floods, apart from displacing millions every year, also contribute to human trafficking as poor families spend several months in flood relief camps from where their children are lured into ‘jobs’. Gaon Connection met several such children and here is what they told us.

Grateful that her parents encouraged her to study and didn't force her to marry at a young age, 20-year-old national level Kabaddi player Neelam Pardhi is aware that she has merely been lucky to do what she wanted in life. There are thousands of girls like her from her 'denotified' community who yearn to decide their own courses of lives — and the young athlete's greatest ambition is to inspire these girls to break free from the shackles of gender divide and get rid of the stigma attached to her community. A ground report from Madhya Pradesh's Panna.

Hilly terrain, hard to extract groundwater and failed schemes make life miserable for the 3,000 odd villagers of Lahuria Deh village in Mirzapur, Uttar Pradesh. Each of them gets just 15 litres of water a day to drink, cook and wash. Women suffer the most. A ground report as part of Gaon Connection's Paani Yatra.

Nawazuddin Siddiqui has been impressing us with his acting abilities ever since he made his debut, but these days netizens can't stop raving about Ganesh Gaitonde – the character he plays in Netflix series Sacred Games. Gaitonde is brutal, brash, abusive and cocky, but the real Nawaz is quite the opposite -- he is simple, adorable and a complete laugh riot

Son of a farmer, Manoj says buying vegetables helps him connect with the outside world and that keeps him rooted. He dislikes attending parties and social gatherings because he is too lazy to decide what clothes to wear, he says. He is someone who, in his own words, likes to keep it simple. He loves to laugh at himself, he cries. In a nutshell, he is as real as one can get