Businessmen may blame global troubles or inept governance, but a Hindu guru has an alternative theory for the historic weakness of India's rupee: the newly adopted symbol for the currency is inauspicious.

Rajkumar Jhanjhari, an expert in the ancient Hindu doctrine of vastu shastra, has called for a new design, arguing that a line on the symbol has "slit the throat" of the rupee and sparked the country's financial gloom.

At least 19 people were killed and 36 injured on Tuesday when a passenger train slammed into a stationary goods train in southern India, a local railway official told Agence France Presse.

The sleeper train collided with the parked goods train at Penneconda station in Andhra Pradesh state as it was travelling overnight to Bangalore, the information-technology hub and capital city of Karnataka state.

Some 16 people died when a bus carrying Muslim pilgrims exploded in a ball of fire after colliding head-on with a truck in northern India, officials said on Saturday.

The bus, which was en route to the Muslim shrine of Ajmer Sharif, slammed into a truck parked on a road near Bahraich town, 105 kilometers (65 miles) from the Uttar Pradesh state capital Lucknow on Friday, district officials said.

India said Tuesday it would cut purchases of Iranian oil by 11 percent following pressure from the United States to join a drive to isolate the Islamic republic over its disputed nuclear program.

Indian refiners expect to import 15.5 million metric tons of crude from Iran in the fiscal year that began April 1, the country's junior oil minister told parliament in a written reply, down from 17.44 million tons last ear.

A trio of "indie Hindi" films are bringing a new Indian cinema to the Cannes Film Festival, where Bollywood stars like to spice up the red carpet but their movies seldom create a serious buzz.

Dealing with corruption and coal mafias, impotency and the porn industry, the films in this year's line-up are part of a burgeoning, alternative Bollywood that departs from commercial song-and-dance hits so popular at home.

Northeast India was shaken by a shallow 5.4-magnitude earthquake on Friday that sent people fleeing into the streets in panic, damaged buildings and left two injured.

One house collapsed and cracks appeared in some buildings in the quake, which had its epicenter in Guwahati, the main commercial city of the mineral- and tea-rich state of Assam.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Tuesday on Pakistan to do more to crack down on violent extremism, a day after she said Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri was believed to be hiding there.

"Combating violent extremism is something we all agree on," Clinton said during a press conference at the end of a trip to India.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton urged energy-starved India on Monday to reduce its Iranian oil imports to keep up pressure on the Islamic republic to come clean about its nuclear program.

Clinton told a town hall meeting in the eastern city of Kolkata that there's an adequate supply in the market for India to find alternative sources of oil.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton landed in India on Sunday with hopes of reinvigorating a relationship seen as losing steam despite efforts to bring the world's two largest democracies closer.

Clinton will be wading into a row over Iran, which is sending a trade delegation this week to New Delhi despite U.S. threats to slap sanctions on countries that buy the Islamic republic's oil.

Hopes dimmed Tuesday of finding more survivors after an overcrowded ferry split in two and sank in northeast India, leaving more than 100 dead and around 100 missing.

Police said 105 bodies, including women and children, had been recovered so far from the fast-flowing waters of the Brahmaputra River in Assam state, where the ferry sank in a sudden storm late Monday afternoon.