Indian officials have freed 51 children kept in "pathetic conditions" in the city of Jaipur amid suspicions they were held as part of a human trafficking racket, officials said Thursday.

The state-funded Rajasthan Commission for Protection of Child Rights said 27 girls aged between seven and 17 years were among the children found on Tuesday in two homes.

India's central bank chief has said "stubborn" inflation remains a major obstacle to growth in India, dimming expectations of an interest rate cut when policymakers meet next week.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) slashed the main interest rate in January for the first time in nine months after a fall in inflation and calls from the government and business leaders for lower borrowing costs.

The maiden flight of India's first domestically developed long-range cruise missile was aborted midway on Tuesday after it veered off course, defense scientists said.

The two-stage Nirbhay missile blasted off from the eastern state of Orissa but the test flight was halted prematurely to "ensure coastal safety", the state-run Defense Research and Development Organization (DRDO) said.

India's largest state-run bank has received 1.7 million applications for just 1,500 entry-level clerk jobs -- and has promised to examine all of them, a report said on Tuesday.

State Bank of India chairman Pratip Chaudhuri attributed the huge interest to good marketing and attractive employment terms, with the number of applications underlining the appeal of "jobs for life" in the Indian public sector.

Indian doctors conducted a post-mortem on Tuesday on the main accused in the New Delhi gang-rape case who was found dead in his jail cell after apparently committing suicide, medical sources said.

The death of 34-year-old Ram Singh in the maximum-security Tihar Jail on Monday led to accusations from his family and lawyers that he had been murdered, with the post-mortem set to determine the cause of death.

The main accused in the fatal gang-rape of a student on a bus in New Delhi last December was found dead in his prison cell Monday, prompting fury from the victim's family and accusations of murder.

Officials at the maximum-security Tihar Jail in the Indian capital said bus driver Ram Singh, 34, had hanged himself with a makeshift noose which he tied to a grille on the ceiling of his cell.

Pakistan's premier Raja Pervez Ashraf arrived in India Saturday for a pilgrimage to a revered Muslim shrine, with Indian Foreign Minister Salman Khurshid welcoming him with "open arms".

Khurshid's warm words for Ashraf -- making his first visit to India as prime minister -- come despite strained relations between the nuclear-armed rivals over recent border clashes.

A fund of millions of dollars raised to help malnourished children in western India has been diverted to maintain public buses, a report said on Friday.

The "Child Nutrition Surcharge" was set up 16 years ago to collect a small percentage of each bus ticket fare in major cities in Maharashtra state, where thousands of children die from malnutrition each year.

India's remote northeast is home to an ancient tribe whose high regard for women makes it a striking anomaly in a male-dominated country.

But as the world marks International Women's Day this Friday, the region has become a staging ground for an unlikely battle in which men are trying to end a matrilineal tradition practised by more than a million people.

Two women have been kidnapped and gang-raped near Delhi, police told Agence France Presse on Thursday, in two separate incidents that highlighted the persistent risk of sexual assault in India.

In one case, three men abducted and attacked a 19-year-old woman, who hailed an auto rickshaw carrying two male passengers near a popular shopping center in Delhi's satellite city of Ghaziabad last weekend, a police official said.