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Last week, a video clip of an elderly woman wailing at the stump of a tree, went viral. Devla Bai Patel, from a village in Chhattisgarh, had planted that peepul a couple of decades ago. It had allegedly been illegally cut down by men, for financial gain. Suddenly, the world saw Devla Bai and heard her pain as she hollered.

Totally unrelated, but joined in the tragedy of not being seen or heard are many women in West Bengal. Our data team found that between 2017 and 2023, only around 1 in 5 cases of crimes against women ended in conviction in the State. Last year, when a doctor was raped and murdered in Kolkata inside a medical college, angry people spilled out o

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