NEW DELHI, India -  Harshita Saxena, the Pantaloons Femina Miss India Earth title winner, has surrendered her crown after landing in a legal soup for breaching a contract with her previous modelling agency Gladrags.  Harshita was in a two-year contract with G;ladrags and was not supposed to participate in any other contest without permission. In the April 5 contest, Parvathy Omanakuttan of Kerala bagged the Miss India World crown and Simran Kaur Mundi of Mumbai became Miss India Universe 2008. Harshita from Goa, was the second runner-up and was crowned Miss India Earth.

NAGPUR, India,  Despite the central government's unprecedented US$15 billion loan waiver, farm suicides continue unabated in Vidarbha with as many as 20 of them reported from different districts of the region in one 72-hour span. The 20 suicides have taken the toll in Vidarbha since the announcement of the union budget to 116 and since Jan 1 this year to 282. The farmers were killing themselves to avoid paying debts and further impoverishing their families.

GURGAON, India – The capital is gripped by the case of Soni Shah, a 28-year-old sales girl who allegedly stabbed an elderly man in a shop in Haryana. Shah has been charged with attempt to murder 64-year-old Vivek Sood and has been sent to 14 days' judicial custody. Shah, a native of West Bengal, alleged that Sood and four others attacked her for failing to deliver a DVD on time and tried to tear off her clothes in Sushant Lok shopping complex Friday.  According to Shah, she stabbed Sood in self-defence with a new kitchen knife she brought in the morning.

BANGALORE, India -  Alarmed over the growing number of fatal road accidents, the Law Commission is working on a new rules to punish vehicle users against rash and negligent driving. There is an injury every second minute and fatality on road every nine minutes in India due to mishaps involving different vehicles.  About 150-200 people die daily in road accidents.

DHAKA, Bangladesh -  Bangladesh's top judge M. Rahul Amin has come out strongly in support of a move to formulate a law to ensure equal rights for women even as Islamist bodies termed it "anti-Quran" and clashed on the streets, leaving 200 wounded. Bangladesh's Islamist bodies that have forged a front are protesting the recently announced national women development policy. Radical groups have been claiming that the policy gives equal inheritance rights to men and women.

RAIPUR, India - The Chhattisgarh government has ordered surprise raids on jails after it discovered convicts having alcohol parties and using cell phones. The government suspended jail superintendent S.K. Mishra. His jail houses about 2,200 prisoners, of which at least 200 are Maoist prisoners.  Two deputy jailers were also suspended following a gang war in Bilaspur central jail last month.

MUMBAI, India - Mumbai based Micro technologies have launched India's first laptop tracking system to locate stolen laptops. Micro Lost Notebook Tracking System (LNTS) is a software product that is embedded on notebook hard drives and is tracked as soon as they are connected to the Internet. P. Shekar, Micro technologies chairperson said  97 percent of expensive laptops that are stolen are never recovered and 57 percent corporate crimes are linked to them.

LUDHIANA, India - The Punjab police have booked a teacher and four students for forcing a student of a college to commit suicide after sexually exploiting him and later blackmailing him. The police found the body of Inder Pal Singh, 25, hanging from the ceiling of his room in Sahnewal town, 25 km from here. He was a student of the Guru Nanak College in Doraha town. In his suicide note, the victim said the college teacher, Chanderdeep Singh, and four other students had been sexually exploiting him for the last year. He said they had also been blackmailing him that they had captured on video the sexual acts and would make it public if he did not meet their demands of arranging money for them to buy liquor.