-TheWire.in The proposed amendments not only make approaching the information commission more cumbersome and legalistic but also defy the diktat of the Supreme Court. The RTI Act has undoubtedly been one of the most empowering legislations for Indians. According to estimates, four to six million information applications are filed every year, making the Indian RTI Act the world’s most extensively used transparency legislation. National assessments have shown that a large number of...

-PTI The country’s largest prison Tihar has been asked by the Central Information Commission to develop a system of giving compensation to inmates who have been incarcerated for a duration more than their sentence period. The Commission has also directed the prison authorities to suo moto disclose the process of compensation to such prisoners as part of their obligation under the Right to Information Act. “Strangely the courts treated the MLA and the...

-The Hindu The Management Information System of MGNREGA is a way to providing data on implementation. But to achieve complete transparency it has to overcome several shortcomings The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) is not only a pioneering livelihood security programme but also a great example of proactive disclosure of information through its Management Information System (MIS). It is the first transaction-based real-time system for any public works programme...

-Hindustan Times The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) conceded on Friday that its crime statistics for 2014 and 2015 had misreported cases registered under Section 66A, a cyber law under the Information Technology Act that was scrapped by the Supreme Court last year. The NCRB’s ‘Crime in India’ report released last month had put the number of people arrested under Section 66A at 3,137 in 2015 and 2423 in 2014. This implied...

-CivilSocietyOnline.com For the past decade state governments have launched a series of Internet-based initiatives to deliver services more efficiently. Technology has been seen as the best way of bypassing red tape and corruption in the system to reach the poor directly with benefits. Beneficiaries are identified through biometrics and a series of tech solutions like smart cards, micro ATMs and so on. The result of these efforts is that India is...