India's Supreme Court on Saturday ruled in favor of a Hindu temple on a disputed religious ground in the country's north and ordered that alternative land be given to Muslims to build a mosque — a verdict in a highly contentious case that was immediately deplored by a key Muslim body. The dispute over land ownership has been one of India's most heated issues, with Hindu nationalists demanding a temple on the site in the town of Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh state for more than a century. The 16th century Babri Masjid mosque was destroyed by Hindu hard-liners in December 1992.

Authorities restricted many private vehicles from taking to the roads of India's capital on Monday amid a public health crisis that has left New Delhi residents gasping and their eyes burning from toxic air pollution. The "odd-even" scheme will restrict private vehicles with odd-number license plates to driving on odd dates while even-numbered plates are allowed on even-numbered dates. It was begun days after authorities began emergency control measures and ordered the closure of schools as pollution levels reached a three-year high.

An Indian designer and architect couple have launched a campaign called ‘Empowerment through Craft’ to help traditional artisans restart sales and trade on an online platform called Direct Create. During a time when the pandemic and a subsequent nationwide lockdown that halted the economy, the online marketing and collaboration platform has come as a huge relief for craftsmen who live in remote parts of the country and have traditionally relied on exhibitions and physical markets to showcase and sell their arts and crafts.

Rescuers found one dead body and pulled out nearly 60 survivors from a collapsed residential building in central India, an official said Tuesday. Workers were still looking for more than 20 people feared trapped in the rubble of the five-story building that collapsed Monday evening.

Indian health officials have found traces of nickel and lead in a few blood samples taken from hundreds of patients who have been hospitalized by a mysterious illness in a southern state, officials said.

A prominent rights group in Indian-controlled Kashmir is advocating for the United Nations to establish a commission of inquiry to investigate what it calls the endemic use of torture by government forces who have faced a decades-long anti-India uprising in the disputed region. The Jammu-Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society on Monday released a detailed report saying India is using torture as a "matter of policy" and "instrument of control" in Kashmir, where rebels have fought Indian rule since 1989.

Thousands of angry Indian farmers protesting new agricultural laws were allowed to enter the capital late Friday after they clashed with police who had blocked them at the outskirts of New Delhi. The farmers, who fear new legislation will reduce their earnings and give more power to corporations, will be escorted to a protest site in New Delhi, police said in a statement. It was not immediately clear where the protests would be held.

President Donald Trump's declaration that he was taking an antimalarial drug of dubious effectiveness to help fend off the coronavirus will be welcomed in India. Trump's previous endorsement of hydroxychloroquine catalyzed a tremendous shift in the South Asian country, spurring the world's largest producer of the drug to make much more of it, prescribe it for front-line health workers treating the virus and deploy it as a diplomatic tool, despite mounting evidence against using the drug for COVID-19.

Fishermen on Wednesday found the body of an Indian coffee shop founder in a river, two days after he disappeared, police said. The body of Cafe Coffee Day founder V.G.Siddhartha has been identified, police Commissioner Sandeep Patel said. He didn't give other details.

Cyclone Fani has made landfall on India's eastern coast as a grade 5 storm, lashing the emptied beaches with rain and wind gusting up to 127 miles per hour. Around 1.2 million people have been evacuated from low-lying areas of Odisha and moved to nearly 4,000 shelters.