Published21 minutes agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, Getty ImagesBy Geeta PandeyBBC News, DelhiAs cyber scams go, this one is rather unique.In early December Mangesh Kumar (name changed) was scrolling on Facebook when he came across a video from the “All India Pregnant Job Service” and decided to check it out. The job sounded too good to be true: money – and lots of it – in return for getting a woman pregnant.It was, of course, too good to be true. So far, the 33-year-old, who earns 15,000 rupees ($180; £142) per month working for a wedding party decoration company, has already lost 16,000 rupees to fraudsters – and they are asking for more. But Mangesh, from the northern Indian state of Bihar, is not the only person to fall for the scam.Deputy superintendent of police Kalyan Anand, who heads the cyber cell in Bihar’s Nawada district, told the BBC there were hundreds of victims of an elaborate con where gullible men were lured to part with their cash on the promise of a huge pay day, and a night in a hotel with a childless woman.So far, his team have arrested eight men, seized nine mobile phones and a printer, and are still searching for 18 others.But finding the victims has proved more tricky.”The gang has been active for a year and we believe they have conned hundreds of people, but no-one has so far come forward to complain, possibly because of shame,” he explained.The BBC has managed to speak to two of the victims – one said he had lost 799 rupees, but didn’t want to discuss details. Mangesh was much more forthcoming and, over the course of several phone calls, revealed how he fell prey to the scammers.”Ten minutes after I’d clicked on the video, my phone rang. The man asked me to pay 799 rupees if I wanted to register for the job,” he told me.The caller – Mangesh calls him Sandeep sir – told him that he would be working for a company in Mumbai and that once he had signed up, he would be sent details of the woman he would have to impregnate.They offered him half a million rupees – almost three years wages – just to have sex with the woman and promised further reward of 800,000 rupees if she conceived.”I’m a poor man, I desperately need money so I believed them,” the father of two young boys told me.Over the next couple of weeks, Mangesh was asked to fork out more than 16,000 rupees – 2,550 rupees to obtain some court documents, 4,500 as safety deposit and 7,998 rupees as Goods and Services Tax (GST) on the money he was going to get. He’s shared all the receipts and the fake court papers with me – the official-looking document has his name and carries his photograph along with that of a man in police uniform. In big capital letters on top, it says “Baby Birth Agreement” and the fine print below reads “pregnancy verification form”.The signature at the end of the document resembles one used by US talk show host Oprah Winfrey.Man travels 1,000 miles to claim bogus prizeCyber gangs earning less as victims refuse to payThe scammers kept him interested by sending him photos of “seven-eight women”, asking him to choose the one he would like to impregnate. “They said they would book a hotel room in the town where I lived and I would meet the woman there,” he said.When Mangesh kept asking for the promised money, they sent him a receipt saying they had credited his bank account with 512,400 rupees but the money was on hold and would be paid after he’d paid 12,600 as income tax.By then, Mangesh says, he had lost an entire month’s salary and told them that he couldn’t pay any more and asked for a refund. “But Sandeep sir refused and when I got angry, he told me that since my bank account showed a credit of 500,000 rupees, income-tax authorities would raid my home and arrest me.”I’m a poor labourer, I’d lost a month’s pay and I didn’t want to get tangled in any criminal case. I was so afraid that I switched off my phone for 10 days. I switched it back on only a few days ago,” he told me, adding that he initially also took me to be a part of the scammers’ gang. According to DSP Anand, the men behind the scam are educated – some are even graduates – and they know how to work mobile phones, laptops and printers. The victims, on the other hand, are from all over India and most have little education.Mangesh says it didn’t strike him that this could be a con because “Sandeep sir” had sent him copies of his identity cards, including one which identified him as an Indian army soldier. He also believed that the display photo on the caller’s WhatsApp – showing an attractive foreign woman cradling a newborn in her arms – was genuine.”You tell me how can you not believe that photo?” he asks. The problem is, cyber law expert Pavan Duggal explains, that people in India, “are by and large very trusting and rarely do an independent verification of information on the internet”, bolstered by an overconfidence in their safety.However, the methodology of the scam in Nawada, he says, “is very novel”. “The scammers lured them with promise of free money and free sex which is a deadly combination. In situations like these, prudence often takes a backseat.” But with the advent of Covid-19 – when cellular and net banking became the norm – Mr Duggal says “the golden age of cyber crime began” and warns that “it will go on for decades”. As cyber criminals come up with newer, innovative and more customised offerings, India will have to work harder to protect people like Mangesh from falling prey to scammers, he adds.”The government needs to do a lot more to create awareness through radio and television broadcasts since people trust the government more.” But the government alone cannot reach each one of India’s 1.4 billion people.India arrests dozens in call centre ‘drugs’ scamCyber-attack on Air India server affects millions”The numbers are overwhelming. And depending on the government alone will take a very long time and the Indian economy will continue to bleed. So the government must give incentives to the private sector to pitch in,” he says. The scammers, meanwhile, still haven’t given up on Mangesh.While on a call with me last week, he rang off saying “the madam” was calling. This, he later explained to me, was the woman he had been promised a meeting with. On Sunday night, he told me he had been speaking to her almost daily.She’s now telling him that “Sandeep sir” is the real conman and he’s pilfered most of the 500,000 rupees Mangesh had been promised, but that he can still get 90,000 rupees if he pays 3,000 rupees as GST. “I told her I’m broke. I pleaded with her to return my money but she said it won’t be possible. I wish she would at least return 10,000 rupees,” he told me.I ask him if he still trusts the scammers.”I really don’t know what to do now. I’ve lost an entire month’s pay and have not been able to send any money to my family in Bihar. My wife is very angry and no longer speaks to me.” He’s angry that “Sandeep sir” no longer takes his call.”Those who cheated me must get the maximum punishment. I do backbreaking work the whole day for 500 rupees. I know I made a huge mistake. But what they did with me is so wrong.”BBC News India is now on YouTube. Click here to subscribe and watch our documentaries, explainers and features.Read more India stories from the BBC:India court cancels release of 2002 riots rapistsIndia’s Sun mission reaches final destinationIndia summons Maldives envoy over Modi insult rowBollywood writers fight against ‘unfair’ contractsCan vaccines help India triumph against TB?

SharecloseShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, Getty ImagesWhen Ranjani Sharma told her husband that she was considering sterilisation, he initially tried to dissuade her.”He said it may impact your health adversely,” the 27-year-old mother-of-three told me on the phone from her home on the outskirts of the northern Indian city of Lucknow.But, Ms Sharma said she was fed up. The couple had decided they didn’t want any more children and had been using condoms to avoid pregnancy. But it was not a “foolproof method” and when she conceived – twice – she took over-the-counter abortion pills.”I had heavy bleeding, my head would spin, I had blackouts and I was listless and tired all the time. So I told him that sterilisation would be better than taking these blighted pills,” she said.The couple considered whether it was her husband who should instead get the procedure done.”But I told him no,” Ms Sharma said. “He’s the family breadwinner and sterilisation will make him weak, he won’t be able to do heavy lifting.”Dr S Shantha Kumari, president of the Federation of Obstetric and Gynaecological Societies of India, says it’s “myths and misconceptions” like these that male sterilisation or vasectomy will impact virility is what prevents men from participating in family planning programmes, leaving the burden of contraception entirely to women.”India’s family planning campaigns, run by the government and non-governmental organisations, are also completely focussed on women. I believe it should be the responsibility of both men and women, that they should be partners in this decision. But the onus is always on women,” she says.The claim is borne out by the latest National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5), the most comprehensive household survey of health and social indicators by the government, conducted between 2019-2021.The survey reveals that more than 99% of married men and women between the ages of 15 and 49 know about at least one modern method of contraception – which includes male and female sterilisation, condoms, pills, injectables and intrauterine devices – and that their usage has increased from 47.8% to 56.5% between 2015-16 and 2019-21. But that’s where the silver lining ends.With fewer than one in 10 men – 9.5% – using condoms, female sterilisation remains the most popular method of contraception and has even risen from 36% to 37.9% in the past five years. Male sterilisation, even though it’s safer and easier, remains unchanged at 0.3%.The survey also saw 50% of men in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Telangana states saying that “contraception is women’s business and a man should not have to worry about it”. One in three men in Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and West Bengal and 45% of men in Karnataka expressed similar views.For things to really change, it’s this attitude that needs to change first, says Abhinav Pandey, who led a research project from 2017-2019 in five states – Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan – on the unequal burden of family planning methods on women.”In all the states we found that male engagement in family planning programmes was very low, mainly due to a lack of awareness,” Mr Pandey says.”There are lots of misconceptions about sterilisation, men feel that they would lose their masculinity and will not be able to work in jobs that involve hard labour. Condoms are more acceptable, but a lot of men told us they didn’t like them because they were uncomfortable and made sex less pleasurable.”In villages and among urban poor, government workers distribute free condoms as part of the family planning programme and as protection from sexually transmitted diseases.But, Akansha Yadav of the GB Pant Institute of Studies in Rural Development, who trains rural health workers and village council members in safe abortion practices, says that many women get pregnant if a condom is faulty or not used correctly or when their husbands come home drunk at night and refuse to use protection. And then it becomes a woman’s headache. With few women aware that abortions are legal in India, Ms Yadav says, women turn to over-the-counter abortion pills or permanent sterilisation – like Ranjani Sharma did.Image source, Getty ImagesDr Kumari says in the first instance, she advocates only long-term reversible contraception, not permanent sterilisation. “Once a couple has had two children, I tell them to go for a temporary but long-term sterilisation and a few years later, they can decide whether they want to go for permanent sterilisation.” For women, she says, long-term contraception comes in the form of intrauterine devices or pills, but there is nothing similar available for men. “There is research going on across the world to find long-term reversible contraception for men, but there is nothing in the basket at the moment.” Mr Pandey says until that happens, family planning programmes must find ways to reach out to men. But don’t expect a miracle, he warns, because the change will be slow.”Men are not comfortable talking about sex in open forums. In rural areas, government health workers are almost all females who deliver condoms to people’s homes but they have little access to men. So we have suggested that that the government recruit male volunteers to mobilise men to increase their participation in family planning.” In 2016, he says, a pilot project was rolled out in 148 districts across India where mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law were called to talk about family planning. In 2019, Rajasthan started calling husbands to these meetings and a year later it was introduced in Uttar Pradesh.”This helped improve male engagement to some extent. We saw that some men started accompanying their wives for counselling sessions, but they were still reluctant to use contraception.” For that to change, Dr Kumari says, the government, doctors and the media need to join hands for a campaign that will convince young men that vasectomy is safe and simple. Until that happens, she says, men will continue to shirk the responsibility of family planning and the burden of contraception will remain a woman’s.Graphic by the BBC’s Shadab NazmiRead more on India’s family survey from the BBC:Indians are getting fatter – and it’s a big problemDoes India really have more women than men?Indian Muslim women fight ‘abhorrent’ polygamyWhat a breakfast murder says about wife beating in IndiaIndia’s preference for sons over daughters remains

SharecloseShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, Getty ImagesIndians are getting fatter, according to a new government survey, and experts are warning about a health emergency unless the growing obesity problem is tackled on a war footing.Once considered a problem of the affluent West, obesity has been spreading in recent years in low and middle-income countries – and nowhere is it spreading more rapidly than in India.Long known as a country of malnourished, underweight people, it has broken into the top five countries in terms of obesity in the past few years.One estimate in 2016 put 135 million Indians as overweight or obese. That number, health experts say, has been growing rapidly and the country’s undernourished population is being replaced by an overweight one.According to the latest National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5), the most comprehensive household survey of health and social indicators by the government, nearly 23% of men and 24% of women were found to have a body mass index (BMI) of 25 or more – a 4% increase for both genders over 2015-16. The data also shows that 3.4% of children under five are now overweight compared with 2.1% in 2015-16.”We are in an obesity epidemic in India and globally, and I fear it could soon become a pandemic if we don’t address it soon,” warns Dr Ravindran Kumeran, a surgeon in the southern city of Chennai (Madras) and founder of the Obesity Foundation of India.Dr Kumeran blames sedentary lifestyles and the easy availability of cheap, fattening foods as the main reasons why “most of us, particularly in urban India, are now out of shape”.BMI, which is calculated by taking an individual’s height and weight into account, is the most accepted measure globally to classify people into “normal”, “overweight”, “obese” and “morbidly obese”. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), a BMI of 25 or above is considered overweight.But Dr Kumeran and many other health experts believe that for South Asian populations, it needs to be adjusted at least two points lower at each stage because we are prone to “central obesity”, which means that we easily put on belly fat, and that’s more unhealthy than weight anywhere else on the body. This would mean that an Indian with a BMI of 23 would be overweight.”If you take 23 as the cut-off point for overweight, I think half the population of India – certainly the urban population – would be overweight,” says Dr Kumeran. According to WHO, too much body fat increases the risk of non-communicable diseases, including 13 types of cancer, type-2 diabetes, heart problems and lung conditions. And last year, obesity accounted for 2.8 million deaths globally. Dr Pradeep Chowbey, former president of the International Federation for the Surgery of Obesity and Metabolic Disorders (Ifso), says “every 10kg of extra weight reduces life by three years. So, if someone is overweight by 50kg, they might end up losing 15 years of life. We also saw that mortality during Covid was three times higher for overweight and obese patients.” Policemen told to slim down or lose jobI’m slim so why am I at risk of diabetes?Dr Chowbey, who pioneered bariatric surgery in India 20 years ago – used as a last resort to treat dangerously obese people with a BMI of 40 or above – says obesity’s medical impact is well known, but what is less talked about is its psychological and social impact.”We did a survey of a 1,000 individuals three years back and we found that being overweight impacted sexual health, it led to poor self-image which could impact people’s psyche and lead to marital disharmony.”And no-one knows it better than Siddharth Mukherjee, a 56-year-old actor who underwent bariatric surgery in 2015.An athlete, he weighed 80-85kg until a few years ago when an accident put an end to his sporting career.”But I had a sportsperson’s diet. I ate a lot of oily, spicy food and I enjoyed drinking, so I kept putting on weight and it went up to 188kg,” he said.And with that came a host of illnesses – diabetes, high cholesterol levels, and thyroid problems – and during a holiday in 2014, he suddenly developed breathing difficulties. “I couldn’t breathe lying down so I had to sleep sitting up,” he said. “But Dr Chowbey has given me a new life. My weight is generally down to 96kg. I go riding my bike, I act on stage, I go on holidays. “There was a time when I couldn’t climb a set of stairs, now I can walk for 17 to 18km in a day, I can eat sweets, I can wear fashionable clothes now.” He said to be fat was a curse for him. “The world is a beautiful place, and we have a commitment to our families so I would tell people to stop being selfish and take care of their health.”Dr Chowbey says for people like Mr Mukherjee, bariatric surgery can be life-saving, but the most important thing is to create awareness about the perils of putting on weight in the first place. But his efforts to get the government to recognise obesity as a disease have remained unsuccessful.Food apps and online gaming driving obesity – WHOKeep your waistline to less than half your height”The government has been busy trying to control infectious diseases and their focus is on communicable diseases, they have very little resources for lifestyle diseases. But obesity is very difficult and expensive to manage, it puts a huge burden on the healthcare system.”A few years ago, there was talk of a “sin tax” which would raise prices of unhealthy foods and drinks to discourage their consumption, but health experts say it never happened because of pushback from companies that market them.Dr Kumeran says that India must adopt the same strategy to discourage unhealthy eating as it did with smoking.He adds that once smoking was allowed in public places, including in flights and offices, but it’s banned now. The government has made it mandatory for TV soaps and films to carry disclaimers and all cigarette packets have pictorial warnings.Dr Kumeran says such repeated warnings help in reinforcing the message and the same needs to be done for obesity. Data interpretation and graphics by the BBC’s Shadab NazmiRead more on India’s family survey from the BBC:Does India really have more women than men?Indian Muslim women fight ‘abhorrent’ polygamyWhat a breakfast murder says about wife beating in IndiaIndia’s preference for sons over daughters remainsMore on this storyI’m slim so why am I at risk of diabetes?Policemen told to slim down or lose jobLiving with obesity: Hard-wired to store fat

SharecloseShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingimage copyrightEPAWhen millions of devout Hindus gathered last month in the Himalayan town of Haridwar to participate in the Kumbh Mela festival even as India battled a devastating second wave of coronavirus, many feared that it would turn out to be a “super-spreader event”. Those fears, it now seems, are coming true, with reports of Kumbh returnees testing positive – and possibly spreading the infection – coming from many parts of the country.When Mahant Shankar Das arrived in Haridwar on 15 March to participate in the festival, cases of Covid-19 were already rising in many parts of India.On 4 April, just four days after the festival officially began, the 80-year-old Hindu priest tested positive for Covid-19 and was advised to quarantine in a tent.But instead of isolating, he packed his bags, boarded a train and travelled 1,000km (621 miles) to the city of Varanasi.There, his son Nagendra Pathak met him at the railway station and they rode a shared taxi to their village 20km (12 miles) away in the adjoining district of Mirzapur.Speaking to me on the phone from his home recently, Mahant Das said he was “now hale and hearty” and that after his return, he had remained at home in quarantine.He insisted that he did not pass on the virus to anyone else, but within days, his son and a few other villagers also developed Covid symptoms.Mr Pathak, who’s also made a full recovery, says their village has seen “13 deaths in the past fortnight from fever and cough”.The infections in the villagers may – or may not – be linked to Mahant Das, but health experts say his behaviour was irresponsible and that by travelling in a crowded train and sharing a taxi, he may have spread the virus to many along the way.Epidemiologist Dr Lalit Kant says “huge groups of mask-less pilgrims sitting on the river bank singing the glories of the Ganges” created an ideal environment for the virus to spread rapidly. “We already know that chorus singing in churches and temples are known to be super-spreader events.”image copyrightReutersIn Haridwar, officials said 2,642 devotees had tested positive, including dozens of top religious leaders. Akhilesh Yadav, former chief minister of neighbouring Uttar Pradesh state, and Nepal’s former King Gyanendra Shah and former Queen Komal Shah, were among those who tested positive after returning home. Bollywood composer Shravan Rathod died in a Mumbai hospital soon after his return from Kumbh. Nine Hindu seers from one group also perished.With growing fears that the Kumbh returnees could start to infect others, several worried state governments ordered a 14-day mandatory quarantine and warned of strict action against those who withheld information about their travels. Some made the RT-PCR test mandatory for them, but few states have a database of travellers and no state has a foolproof system of testing and tracing those entering its borders. In the past fortnight, reports of Kumbh returnees testing positive have come from all over India: Authorities in Rajasthan blame the pilgrims for the rapid spread of Covid cases in the state, especially in rural areas At least 24 Kumbh visitors tested positive on return to the eastern state of Odisha (formerly Orissa) In Gujarat, at least 34 of a total of 313 passengers returning by one train were positive And 60 of the 61 – or 99% – returnees tested in a town in central Madhya Pradesh state were found to be infected. Officials are now frantically looking for 22 others who are missing”It’s disastrous,” says Dr Kant. “And these numbers are only the tip of the iceberg. The groups of pilgrims travelling in crowded trains and buses would have the multiplier effect on the number of infections. I can say without hesitation that the Kumbh Mela is one of the main reasons behind the rise in cases in India.”Mahant Das is combative when I ask him if it would have been better to cancel the Kumbh at a time India was recording huge surges in daily cases and hospitals were turning away patients due to a shortage of beds, medical oxygen and life-saving drugs.”How is it right for the government to hold election rallies and elections in West Bengal then? Why is it that only we, the devout, are being told that it was wrong to gather?” he asks.image copyrightReutersCritics say Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s reluctance to cancel the gathering was because of possible backlash from Hindu religious leaders like Mahant Das. The priests, the seers and the ascetics are among the party’s biggest supporters and play an important role in mobilising Hindu votes during elections. On 12 April, the first big day of the festival – when more than three million devotees took a dip in the river Ganges in the belief that bathing there would help them attain salvation – India logged more than 168,000 new cases, overtaking Brazil to become the country with the second-highest number of cases globally. The festival was scaled down only a week later after the lead monk of one of the participating groups died. Mr Modi requested the seers to turn the festival from then on into a symbolic event.But the damage had already been done.India is a Covid disaster – it didn’t have to beA visual guide to the Covid crisis in IndiaLast week, the event organisers said 9.1 million pilgrims visited Haridwar even as the Uttarakhand high court said the state had become a “laughing stock by allowing the Kumbh Mela in the midst of a raging pandemic”.There had been concerns from the start that holding the Kumbh was fraught with risks.Health experts had warned the government in early March that “a new and more contagious variant of the coronavirus was taking hold in the country” and letting millions of largely unmasked people gather for a festival was not prudent. Uttarakhand’s former chief minister, Trivendra Singh Rawat, told me that he had planned the Kumbh to be a “limited, symbolic event” from the start because experts were “telling me that the pandemic is not going to end soon”. “The festival attracts people from not just India, but other countries too. I was worried that healthy people would visit Haridwar and take the infection back with them everywhere. “But just days before the festival, he was replaced by Tirath Singh Rawat, who famously remarked that with “the blessings of Ma Ganga [Ganges, the river goddess] in the flow, there would be no corona”.The new chief minister said “nobody will be stopped”, a negative Covid report was not necessary to attend, and that it would be enough to follow safety rules. But as millions descended on the town, officials struggled to impose safety norms.Haridwar’s chief medical officer, Dr Shambhu Kumar Jha, told me that crowd management became “very difficult” because people didn’t come with negative reports and that they “couldn’t turn back the devout who had come all the way driven by faith”. “You can’t hang people for wanting to attend a religious festival, can you?” he asked.”There were standard operating procedures (SOPs) by the federal government and the high court and we tried our best to implement them,” he added.”With crowds of that size, SOPs became almost impossible to follow. They look very good on paper, but it’s impossible to implement them,” Anoop Nautiyal, founder of an Uttarakhand-based think tank, told the BBC.Mr Nautiyal, who has been collating the health ministry data since the state recorded its first case on 15 March 2020, says Uttarakhand had recorded 557 cases in the week from 14 to 20 March, just as pilgrims had begun arriving. The cases rose rapidly after that, with 38,581 cases recorded between 25 April and 1 May – the last week of the festival.”It will be wrong to say all the cases were because of the festival, but the surge has coincided with the festival,” he said.I asked Dr Kant if there’s anything India could do now to contain the damage done by allowing the gathering.”Someone said that the devotees will take the coronavirus as prasad [god’s blessing] and spread it. It’s tragic that the pilgrims have carried the infection everywhere,” he said.”I can’t think of anything that can be done now to rectify the situation. Our ship has gone too far out into the sea. We can’t even return to the safety of the harbour. It’s very, very tragic. I just pray that the infections were mild and people can get over them.”