-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...

-The Hindu No action taken against hospitals or blood banks, says RTI activist. In the last 17 months alone, 2,234 persons across India have been infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) while getting blood transfusions. The maximum number of such cases — 361 — was reported from Uttar Pradesh due to unsafe blood transfusion practices in hospitals. Just last week, a three-year-old boy from Assam’s Kamrup district, admitted to the Gauhati Medical College...

-The Hindu Jaipur: Ironic though it may sound, a unique memorial celebrating the Right to Information has come up in the Beawar town of Rajasthan — where the RTI movement had started 20 years ago — at a time when the Bharatiya Janata Party government in the State has opted to delete chapters on the evolution of RTI campaign and law from its school textbooks. Hundreds of people from all walks of...

-TheWire.in The right to information and to education give the government the mandate to make policies that guarantee the delivery of educational resources to all. But the Copyright Act needs to be amended to strengthen fair use exceptions for educational purposes. Last August, the University of Maryland University College made an announcement that it had replaced its undergraduate textbooks with open educational resources (OER), thereby becoming the first university in the world...

-TheWire.in The new policy is clearly informed by conservative pro-IP ideology, which big capital promotes in order to gain from current developments in science and technology. The National Intellectual Property Rights policy was approved by the cabinet on May 12, 2016 and released to the press a day later by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley. It is a “first of its kind” policy for India, covering all forms of intellectual property together in a...