Crime
Migration Mess: No jobs in hand amid food crisis, Madhya Pradesh’s Khandwa witnesses tribal exodus

Adivasis from the region move to other states for employment, only to find themselves worked to the bone, living in grim conditions and often cheated of their wages or held hostage by employers.
“I have a wife and five daughters, but there’s no work in the village. Even if you find some, the panchayat takes months to pay us,” said 35-year-old Poonamchand Sitaram Gautam, a resident of Khandwa district in Madhya Pradesh, who recently returned from Koratala in Telangana, where he was employed as a construction worker.
“Under the Public Distribution System, we receive just 5 kg of foodgrains for each member of the family every month. But these rations barely last a fortnight,” he added, alluding to the food crisis in his tribal-dominated village of Dabhia in the state’s Khalwa region.
Based on a field study conducted in 12 states by Ekta Parishad, Madhya Pradesh is purported to have the highest inter-state migration rate — standing at 32.39 per cent, Khandwa being one of the districts leading. According to estimates by a local body, between 5,000 and 10,000 tribals migrate out of Khalwa every year to work as labourers in other states.
Khalwa is spread over 70 to 100 km from the district headquarters. While many villages of this block are part of the Khandwa-Betul State Highway, most of Khalwa falls under the jurisdiction of the forest department, with 90 per cent of the population living in remote areas. In fact, when 101Reporters visited Dabhia, we found that at least two members from each house had migrated to other states for work.
Last year, Gautam’s 16-year-old daughter Garima found work as a labourer to build drains under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). After working eight hours a day for five weeks, Garima was paid only two weeks’ worth of wages. When her mother Rajni Bai questioned the panchayat, she was told that the money had been transferred to her account, but they have yet to receive it.
Jamna Kallu Chauhan, too, shared her woes. “In the last two weeks, I carried out digging work for the panchayat eight hours a day. But I was paid only for one week. I approached the panchayat office in Semliya repeatedly, but no one cooperated with me,” the 60-year-old said.
The sarpanch of Semliya panchayat Pyari Bai Ramesh Takher, however, denied any outstanding payments.
“No labourer’s wages are outstanding with the panchayat,” she claimed. “The money has been transferred into their accounts. The villagers often withdraw money and blame us later.”
No logic to the numbers
Kishore Kumar Uike, the CEO of Janpad panchayat, insisted that the district is continually opening up job opportunities for the area’s local residents.
“Janpad panchayat has created employment for 17,000 labourers in the development block,” he said. “I don’t understand why people are migrating for work. Even today, if anyone approaches us for work through the panchayat or district, we will provide them with work.”
According to the MGNREGA website, which currently seems inaccessible, 3,821 days of wages were generated in Khalwa from May 2020 to May 2021, benefiting 644 workers. The work given to labourers included pond construction, canal deepening and dam checks. The website has had no updates since then.
A hunger-induced distress migration
According to Prakash Michael, treasurer of the Spandan Samajseva Samiti, an organisation working to provide nutrition and employment to these tribals, the primary cause for migration is the food crisis in the region, which has increased in the last couple of decades.
“Adivasis have ditched growing traditional crops and turned to cash crops such as soybean. Bajra and other millets such as koda and kutki, once the backbone of their nutrition, are no longer visible in the fields. They use most of the money they earn by selling produce to repay loans. They are left with very little foodgrains, so this is basically hunger-induced distress migration,” Michael told 101Reporters.
This explanation holds true for 60-year-old Jamna, who now lives alone in her hut. Her husband, Kallu Chauhan, had “taken up a contractual job of harvesting moong in Nahali, Harda district, despite being terribly ill. The family’s financial crisis had pushed him to move, and within three days, we lost him to the illness.”
One lakh labourers migrate from Nimar
While the administration has no official figures to share, Spandan Samajseva Samiti, which collects data for land surveys, estimates that around 1 lakh people from Khandwa, Khargone, Barwani and Burhanpur of Nimar district migrate to Maharashtra, Telangana, Karnataka, Goa and Andhra Pradesh each year.
However, this large workforce is unorganised and unprotected. These labourers are neither insured by their employers, nor are they provided safety equipment for use while working. This often leads to their death, and since there are no official records of migrant labourers, employers shirk their responsibilities by deeming them mere accidents.
Under the Inter-State Migrant Workmen Act, the employer must provide migrant workers with food, lodging, healthcare and social activities. Labour officials must be kept in the loop to ensure that workers’ rights are not violated. Also, the figures of migrant workers must be displayed on the Migrant Labourer Portal, though no data appears to track this information.
District Labour Officer S.S. Alawa explained that the act “can be invoked only if the contractors or residents officially inform the department about their migration, which the tribals here fail to do. Hence, they cannot exercise any rights under this law”.
Wily contractors, callous employers
Furthermore, contractors here deploy locals to connect them with labourers. These people take advantage of their knowledge of the Korku dialect and lure the tribals by promising large sums of money as wages. They are often paid an advance so they believe it’s a good deal and manage to convince their friends and neighbours, too.
On the appointed day, the contractor’s vehicle arrives at the village to transport the migrants. The journey usually takes place at night, so the workers don’t recognise where they are being taken. They often don’t find out for days and weeks which village, district or state they are working in. The contractor shares his mobile number to placate the families, but the phone is often turned off once they set out with the migrant labourers.
Daji Lofa, a 30-year-old who returned from harvesting sugarcane in Maharashtra, recalls a contractor who had come to the village before Diwali last year and promised everyone cane-cutting work for three months. He had also promised them huge amounts of money, which would enable them to stay home without working for the rest of the year. He had paid an advance of Rs 7,000 to one of the workers. A week after Diwali, the contractor arrived at 11 pm with two mini Eichers and took 40 people with him. But they were refused pay after putting in hours of hard labour.
Such are the kinds of experiences that the tribals of Khandwa attempt to flee.
Babu Mangal, one of the workers from Khalwa held hostage in Pandharpur, Maharashtra, last year, said they were treated worse than animals. He, along with his wife, had to continue harvesting sugarcane despite being terribly ill.
“We didn’t get any treatment when we were ill. We had to arrange for our own food and sleep in the open fields or inside warehouses,” the 50-year-old told 101Reporters.
Similarly, when Sunita Kajle from Langoti village went to Maharashtra to work, she found out she was pregnant. But she was still forced to continue working long hours without relief or proper nutrition until the sixth month of her pregnancy. As a result, she gave birth to a malnourished daughter after returning.
In some cases, the tribals bear the consequences of this survival act — the migration — longer than they could have anticipated, at times for life.
Take Munni Bai, for instance. She injured herself while working at a brick kiln and continues to live with it. She had dropped bricks on her feet, which initially caused swelling and later became worse. Munni can no longer work due to her injured leg and has received no compensation from neither the contractor nor the government.
Socio-economic factors
Khandwa district has a population of 13,10,061, of which 80.20 per cent live in villages. The literacy rate of Khalwa is only 43.10 per cent (51 per cent among males and 34 per cent among females). Despite this, the proportion of labour in Khalwa is 17.38 per cent, of which 9.66 per cent is male and 7.72 per cent female. Agriculture is the primary source of income, but the people here barely own any land, 2 acres per family on an average.
The percentage of total agricultural farmers in the tehsil is 14.08 per cent in Khalwa, of which 9.88 per cent are male and 4.20 per cent are female. There’s no focus on employment-oriented education, and the entire sector is dependent on resources from agriculture and forests.
In 2009-2010, the state government had created natural resource-related jobs in Awliya under the Small Forest Produce Association, for the manufacture of incense sticks, perfumes, bamboo furniture and household items. Initially, over a 100 people were employed under this scheme, but they could not grow beyond making incense sticks, which wasn’t financially viable and hence, discontinued.
Crime
Rise In Child Sexual Assaults By Teachers In Mumbai Sparks Alarming Questions

In recent days, incidents of sexual assault on minors or students by teachers in Mumbai have been increasing, which is a serious issue in society. A private tutor in Malad sexually abused a 7-year-old girl. The Dindoshi police have arrested the accused, a 44-year-old teacher from Goregaon who provided private tutoring to young girls at home. The victim, who lived in the same building, had been attending his tutoring sessions since August 2024. The accused lured her into his bedroom under the pretext of showing her games on his mobile and exploited her innocence to sexually abuse her.
After noticing behavioural changes in their daughter, the parents questioned her, and she revealed the horrific abuse. The teacher had been assaulting her for nearly a year, from August 2024 to July 9, 2025. On July 9, a 22-year-old karate instructor, who taught children, was arrested by the Shivaji Park police for sexually abusing a 12-year-old girl. On June 25, a 50-year-old teacher from a reputed coaching class in Bhayander was found to have sexually abused a 17-year-old FY BA student between October and November 2024.
In November 2024, Amit Dubey, 50, a school teacher in Nalasopara’s Santosh Bhuvan area, was accused of raping a 14-year-old student in his private class from October to November 2024. On July 3, 2025, a 40-year-old female teacher from a prestigious Dadar school was arrested for sexually abusing a 16-year-old student over several months, including taking him to a five-star hotel. There are several unreported incidents as well.
Statement Of Uma Subramanian
Uma Subramanian, Co-founder and Director RATI Foundation & Child’s Rights Activist, stated, “I would not say the incidents are increasing, but they are now coming to light more frequently. The media is reporting them more prominently. People are shocked because these cases involve prestigious schools.”
She added, “Schools often scrutinise peons, drivers, and caretakers for character verification, but fail to check the backgrounds of teachers. This reflects a class and caste bias. When such cases arise, schools often deflect responsibility, claiming the incidents happened outside school premises or that parents are unwilling to file complaints. While every school has a child protection policy, most children and parents remain unaware of it. Schools may conduct awareness sessions but avoid taking legal action, shifting the burden onto parents. few come forward to file cases.”
“Section 19 of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act mandates reporting offences against children. However, many cases go unreported because the legal process is traumatic for victims and their families. Filing an FIR takes 8-10 hours, medical examinations could span over days… frequent police station visits are required, and the judicial process is tiring. As a result, no one wants to go through the process, definitely not the big schools or the elite privileged folks. The law is robust and child-friendly on paper, but most systems are not. Also, the elite in India can get away more easily with anything, isn’t it?,” the activist said.
Psychologist Lisha Chedda’s Statement
Psychologist Lisha Chedda stated, “Usually, in such incidents, the accused follows a certain process called grooming. They spend time with the child, gain their trust, build rapport, and then abuse them. Two things severely impact the child mentally: their trust is broken, and they are left terrified. Often, people don’t believe the child after they disclose abuse, which further violates their trust. Sometimes, gender bias also comes into play—people may think, ‘If the victim is a boy, what could have happened to him?’ This is wrong. Abuse is abuse; it is sexual violence. The child may become traumatised and feel deep shame, which can be internalised.Chedda added, “Everybody has a stress response system: fight, flight, freeze, flop or fawn. These are natural reactions. Studies show that in sexual assault cases, most victims freeze. The child becomes extremely scared and often freezes. First of all, no one immediately believes the child. They keep questioning why the child didn’t scream or run away. The child’s response is not taken seriously.
The kind of response they receive from the adults around them affects their lifelong trauma. If the child receives mental health support, along with parental and school support, the impact on them can be much less severe.”
Advocate Persis Sidhva’s Statement
Advocate Persis Sidhva, stated, “The courts generally take these cases seriously. Parents send their children to school believing it to be a safe place. Schools must have and strictly implement a child protection policy. These policies shouldn’t exist just on paper – they need to be actively enforced. Parents need to be aware of the POCSO Act and that it mandates strict punishments, especially when teachers are the accused, as these cases constitute aggravated offences with harsher punishments.”
“In court, we often see that schools either lack commitment or frequently side with the accused to protect the institution’s reputation. This fear leads them to support the perpetrator, leaving children and their families without proper support. In most cases, schools fail to create an environment where the child and family feel comfortable continuing their education there. This often results in a significant loss for the child-first they suffer abuse, then they’re forced to change schools, while parents must deal with numerous additional challenges, including a legal case.” Advocate Sidhva added.
Crime
Mumbai Airport Customs Seize 7.318 Kg Of Hydroponic Weed & 99 Bottles Of Codeine Syrup Across 4 Cases

Mumbai: During the period 15th-20th July, the officers at Airport Commissionerate, Mumbai Customs, Zone-III, made a remarkable seizure of suspected NDPS (hydroponic weed) weighing 7.318 kg and 99 bottles of 100ml each cough syrup containing codeine phosphate across 04 cases. 04 persons were Arrested.
Highlights of the case:
(14/15.07.2025)
Case 1. On the basis of profiling, Customs officers at CSMI Airport , Mumbai Customs, Zone – III intercepted 01 passenger arriving from Bangkok to Mumbai and recovered 610 grams of hydroponic weed. The smuggled goods were concealed inside the trolley bag carried by the passenger. 01 passenger was arrested under the provisions of Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act, 1985.
(15/16.07.2025)
Case 2. On the basis of profiling, Customs officers at CSMI Airport, Mumbai Customs Zone -III intercepted 01 passenger arriving from Bangkok to Mumbai and Recovered 5256 grams of hydroponic weed. The smuggled goods were concealed inside the check-in baggage carried by the passenger. 01 passenger was arrested under the provisions of Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act, 1985.
(16/17.07.2025)
Case 3. On the basis of Specific Intel, Customs officers at CSMI Airport, Mumbai Customs Zone -III intercepted 01 passenger arriving from Bangkok to Mumbai and Recovered 1452 grams of hydroponic weed. The smuggled goods were concealed inside the trolley bag carried by the passenger. 01 passenger was arrested under the provisions of Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act, 1985.
(19/20.07.2025)
Case 4. On the basis of information received, Customs officers at CSMI Airport, Mumbai Customs Zone -III intercepted 01 passenger departing from Mumbai to Riyadh and recovered 99 bottles of cough syrup containing codeine phosphate as its constituent. The smuggled goods were concealed inside the check-in baggage carried by the passenger. 01 passenger was arrested under the provisions of Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act, 1985.
Crime
Thane Crime Branch Seizes ₹1.69 Crore Worth MD Powder; Man Arrested While En Route To Mumbra

The Thane Crime Branch Unit One has arrested a man for allegedly possessing over 1 kilogram of MD powder, valued at ₹1.69 crore, which he intended to sell in Mumbra. The accused has been identified as Mohanlal Joshi alias Sharma, a resident of Kudus village in Wada, Palghar.
According to officials, acting on a tip-off received on July 18, a team was deployed near the Mumbra bypass flyover bridge, where the suspect was expected to arrive. The man was intercepted in his car en route to Mumbra. Upon searching the vehicle, the police discovered and seized 1.209 kilograms of MD powder, with an estimated value of ₹1,69,26,000.
He was taken to the police station, and a case was registered against him under the relevant sections of the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act.
An investigating officer from Thane Crime Branch Unit One said they are currently probing the source of the contraband and its intended recipients. Efforts are also underway to determine how many others may be involved in the case. Further investigation is ongoing.
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