It’s exactly like it sounds.
I mean, come on, everyone. We all know how bad it is when women talk, right? The elders of this Indian village have bravely decided to limit all that pernicious communication, and it turns out that the final straw came when they realized that cell phones were giving women too much freedom to choose their spouses:
Members of the all-male panchayat (an informal, but respected council of village leaders) justified their ruling by arguing that the reputation of their village has been compromised by the handful of single women who have eloped with their partners as well as some married women who have left their husbands by eloping with their current partners.
So, as a group, women are unhappy enough in their marriages that the village is seeing an epidemic of extramarital affairs and elopements, and their solution is to keep women from talking to anyone? That should totally work.
Bonus Anger Fuel: The final paragraph of the article, where we learn that Indian women get raped because they aren’t sexually satisfied.