The Tripura Board of Secondary Education awarded Bikash Majumdar and Biswajit Dey the first division in the higher secondary examination this year. Scores of 17 and 18-year-olds accomplish this feat every year – so why is Majumdar and Dey’s success newsworthy? The two young men happen to be murder convicts, serving life terms at the Agartala Central Prison.

Majumdar and Dey scored 323 and 304 respectively out of a possible 500. One more lifer at the Agartala prison, Gour Acharjee, passed the examination in the second division. Gour missed the first division by only five marks. All three got over 75% marks in some papers.Yet another convict serving life imprisonment, Kulendra Debbarma, passed Madhyamik (the school-leaving exam) in the second division this year.

The port town of Beypore, 11 kilometres from Calicut, is where an ancient ship-building industry still survives

If you look for Beypore on a map, chances are you will never find it. But this sleepy coastal hamlet in Kerala was once a major port holding the glorious history of Indian trade with the Middle East. Even today, millions of rupees exchange hands here.

On a recent Sunday morning, the Indira Gandhi Memorial Maternity Hospital in Agartala was unusually crowded. Women and children thronged the corridors of the children’s ward. This is the best medical facility in the city for mother-and-baby-care. On its second floor, an anxious woman waited just outside the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). The nursing staff knew her well – Monty Saha had been a fixture at the hospital for more than two weeks.

The woman was weeping. When approached, she just turned her face and pleaded, “Please give my child……. please give my child.”

Herded into refugee camps in Tripura, the Reangs of Mizoram have fewer facilities than refugees from Sri Lanka and Tibet.

Dinomati Reang sits silently on a hilltop, immersed in thought, with no tears in her eyes as she gazes at the remains of the huts emerging from the ashes. She lost everything, including her two -and-a-half year old twins in that fire. She struggles to make sense of what has happened…. And still hopes beyond hope for a tomorrow that she does not know.