A powerful bomb hidden in a briefcase ripped through a busy crowd outside New Delhi's High Court on Wednesday, killing 11 people and injuring 66, many of them petitioners waiting for legal hearings.

The device had been placed near an entrance gate reception area, where more than 100 people were queuing for passes to the court complex, located in the heart of the Indian capital.

India has built a global reputation as a major player in information technology, but lack of Internet access among its own citizens is posing a threat to long-term growth.

One typical young Indian frustrated by the country's poor Internet facilities is Srishti Sharma, 18, a student at the elite Lady Shri Ram College in the capital New Delhi.

The local government in Kolkata, once capital of British India, is to kick off plans Tuesday to transform the congested city into a "second London" replete with a London Eye ferris wheel.

Mamata Banerjee, the feisty newly elected chief minister of the state of West Bengal, made an election pledge to transform the dysfunctional and poverty-stricken Indian metropolis into a world class city.

Suspected rebels in Indian Kashmir detonated two blasts outside a police station on Wednesday, injuring nine officers in one of the disputed region's most volatile towns.

Hospital staff said four of the policemen were in a critical condition after the morning attack in Sopore, 55 kilometers north of the provincial summer capital Srinagar.

Rima Singh, an executive with an Indian outsourcing company, smokes, drinks and dates boyfriends in New Delhi --- but doesn't tell her parents back home in small-town India.

Three years ago, the 24-year-old left what she described as a mundane life full of strict social conventions in the town of Mathura in northern India and headed for the bright lights of New Delhi.

Skimpily dressed women will take to the streets of New Delhi later this month for India's first "Slut Walk", a global phenomenon to protest sexual violence.

The capital is India's most dangerous city for women where leering and harassment are a daily menace and a woman is raped every 18 hours or molested every 14 hours, according to the latest police figures.

India's pilgrimage centers are fast becoming hot-spots for hotel chains, as both domestic and international groups look to plug a gap in the market for quality accommodation.

Devotees flocking to so-called "temple towns" such as Shirdi in western Maharashtra state, the Sikh holy city of Amritsar in Punjab and far-flung Haridwar have for years had to make do with basic facilities.

Ferrari launched its first dealership in India on Thursday, seven years after it entered China but with the same aim of satisfying demand for flashy cars from the growing class of Asia's super-rich.

The full range of sports cars from the Italian manufacturer will be on sale, with the cheapest model, the California, priced at 22 million rupees (485,000 US dollars) after punitive import tariffs of more than 100 percent are applied.

Ten people were killed when a small plane carrying a patient to hospital crashed into a house near the Indian capital New Delhi, police said Thursday.

All seven people on board died, along with three women living in the house, when the single-propeller plane came down in a heavily populated neighborhood of Faridabad town.

Urgent global action is needed to prevent the spread of a multi-drug-resistant "superbug" after it was found in water supplies in the Indian capital, doctors said in research published Thursday.

The study in The Lancet medical journal said that New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase 1 (NDM-1) producing bacteria were found in 51 out of 171 samples taken from water pools and rivulets and two out of 50 tap water samples in the city.