Julie McCarthy

Gautam Lewis has had the sort of life that could spring from the pages of a fairy tale.

Afflicted with polio at 18 months, he was taken in by Mother Teresa when he was 3. He doesn't know all the details of how he came to live at her Home for Children in Kolkata, but he does speak of the courage his family must have had to give him up.

A steady rain falls on velvet green terraces, releasing a powerful scent of newly harvested tea. A ripple of voices tumbles down the hillside as a man barks orders.

The tea pickers, all women, many in bare feet, expertly navigate the leech-infested slopes. Balancing hampers on their backs loaded with freshly plucked tea leaves, they descend for their morning tea break.

The move has sent shockwaves across India's financial sector: Raghuram Rajan, the governor of India's Reserve Bank who's been buffeted by political attacks, announced that he will be leaving. The 53-year old economist had said he was open to a second term, but will instead be returning to academia in the United States when his three-year tenure is up in September.

There has been intense speculation about whether Rajan, who had been appointed Reserve Bank chief by the previous government, would serve a second term under the administration of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

With near universal literacy and long life expectancy, the small Indian state of Kerala is a model for the rest of India.

In recent weeks, however, the small state tucked at the bottom of the country has been in the spotlight for what its glowing human development indicators do not reveal.

It sometimes takes an awful event to uncover maladies beneath the surface, and here, it was the savage murder of an underprivileged law student.

Tukaram Jadhav was barely surviving off of his tiny cotton farm when he killed himself last September. His widow, a petite mother of two, pulls her purple sari tightly around her, and says she discovered her husband as he lay dying.

"I was the one who found him. I was sleeping and woke up to the powerful smell of pesticides that we use to farm," Bhagyashree Jadhav says. She says she thought there had been a spill. "I asked my husband if he smelled it, then I realized he couldn't speak. He'd swallowed the pesticide." Tukaram languished in the hospital for two days before dying.

A fire crackles along the banks of the Yamuna River: a cremation of a young mother, struck by a car while she was fetching water.

The stench of the river engulfs the sad assembly.

Before the hissing funeral pyre, floating down the river, white blocks of what looks like detergent appear like icebergs. It is 95 degrees in Delhi this night. This is chemical waste from factories that have sprung up across the city, manufacturing leather goods, dyes and other goods.

Downstream, the living reside along garbage-strewn banks.

Early morning light filters into the cavernous gymnasium as Neetu lunges, climbs and contorts her body into impossible positions. She shimmies up a thick rope that dangles from the two-story ceiling, her heavily muscled arms propelling her upward. She races through calisthenics with 25 other young women in the boot camp atmosphere of Chhotu Ram Stadium and Wrestling Center, in the Indian state of Haryana, known for its wrestling tradition.

The grueling twice-a-day practice– 4 hours in the morning and 3 1/2 in the afternoon-- is her ordinary routine.

Vijay Mallya is one of India's most flamboyant business figures, known as a liquor baron, an airline owner, and a man who reportedly owns 250 vintage cars.

But Mallya, 60, is now known as a debtor who is being pursued by banks to recover the mountain of debt he has accrued. He left the country on March 2, just as some 17 banks were closing in on him for payment of delinquent loans totaling the equivalent of nearly $1.5 billion.

India has deployed thousands of army and paramilitary troops to quell violence that authorities say has killed at least 10 people in the northern Indian state of Haryana. A caste known as the Jats is leading the unrest to demand affirmative-action benefits from the government.

Jats make up more than a quarter of Haryana's 25 million people. They seek to be included in the official category of "Other Backward Classes."

In India, a university student is accused of uttering anti-India slogans that valorized a Kashmiri separatist. Is such sloganeering in support of Afzal Guru, who was hanged for his role in an attack on the Indian Parliament, a case of free speech or sedition?

Indians are sharply divided.

In a far-reaching ruling, India has prohibited telecom service providers from charging different prices to consumers to access content on the Internet — a blow to Facebook and its aggressive bid to offer a free but stripped-down version of the Internet aimed at India's poor.

India and France have signed a "memorandum of understanding" on the sale of 36 French fighter jets to New Delhi.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said financial details of the agreement to buy the Rafale jets, manufactured by Dassault Aviation, have yet to be sorted but will soon be finalized. Reporting from New Delhi, NPR's Julie McCarthy says the defense deal was one of a number of pacts reached during extensive talks between Modi and French President Francois Hollande, who is on a three-day trip to India.

Climate negotiators in Paris are wrangling over "country commitments," "caps" and "cuts" in greenhouse gases.

Some environmentalists, however, argue that the most important "c" word is missing: consumption. In India, they say little will change unless fossil-fuel-reliant rich countries moderate how they consume energy.

"An inconvenient truth is that we do not want to talk about consumption or lifestyle," says environmentalist Sunita Narain.

Conjuring images of a dystopia, the shroud of bad air blanketing New Delhi in recent weeks has intensified global pressure on India to curb its greenhouse gas emissions.

India will arrive at the climate change summit in Paris next week as the third biggest generator of fossil fuel pollution blamed for warming the planet, after China and the U.S.

Half of India's emissions come from burning coal. A visit to the coal-rich northeastern Indian state of Jharkhand reveals how this stands to get even worse.

In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party suffered a convincing defeat in a crucial state election that was seen as a referendum on Modi's leadership.

Results are still being counted in the state of Bihar, but the BJP has conceded to the projected winner, Nitish Kumar, an anti-Modi stalwart and the sitting chief minister, a post akin to a U.S. governor.

The Missionaries of Charity founded by Mother Teresa says it has shut down its adoption services in India over religious objections to the country's new adoption rules. The Catholic sisters known for their blue and white habits and vow of free service to the poor say they have asked the government to de-register 13 orphanages.

The world's third-largest carbon polluter has submitted its long-range plan to curb greenhouse gas admissions in advance of December's Paris climate summit. India does not commit to an absolute reduction in carbon emissions, but does promise to ramp up renewable energy to help slow global warming.

Jawaharlal Nehru towered over 20th century India — a thinker, a statesman, the heir to Mahatma Gandhi. As one of the founding fathers of modern India, Nehru oversaw his country's transition from a British colony to a democracy, and announced the birth in 1947 of a free India.

In the capital, the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library honors the man's legacy. Depending on where you stand, new plans by the government to modernize the museum fall somewhere between an apostasy that dilutes the great struggle for Indian independence and a facelift of a faded but once glorious building.

The Indian government is seeking $99 million in damages from Swiss food and beverage giant Nestle over a recent food scare involving the Maggi brand of instant noodles that are a household staple in India.

The class action, filed late Tuesday before India's National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission, accuses Nestle of "gross negligence, apathy and callousness."

India is an ancient, traditional country. It's also a democracy that's very modern when it comes to the Internet and technology.

That's one reason the country sometimes sends mixed messages like this: Publishing or distributing pornography in print or on the Web is illegal in India. But viewing it is not.

With this in mind, lawyer Vijay Panjwani argued before the Supreme Court last month that pornography should be blocked as broadly as possible.

"Pornography is a criminal activity from A to Z. Completely!" he says.