Broadcasters attending the United Nations-backed fourth World Electronic Media Forum (WEMF 4) have called for sustained and concrete global action to address the murder of journalists in peacetime and in war. “Most journalists are killed not in war zones but in their own countries as they try to shine the light of the truth into the darkest recesses of their societies,” they said in a declaration adopted unanimously at the...
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Royalty and RTI by Deepa Kurup
IN the digital age, the implementation of the Right to Information Act, 2005, is deeply linked to the technology that will be adopted to store public documents and information in digital formats. Thus, the National Policy on Open Standards in E-Governance is critical to “ensure reliable long-term accessibility to public information”, wrote RTI activists, under the aegis of the National Campaign for People’s Rights to Information (NCPRI), in a letter...
More »Maternal tragedies by TK Rajalakshmi
A Human Rights Watch report emphasises the need for a system of recording and investigating all maternal deaths. THE maternal mortality ratio (MMR) is calculated by the number of maternal deaths for every 100,000 births. Consider this: In 2005, India’s MMR was 16 times that of Russia, 10 times that of China and four times higher than that in Brazil. Why should there be such high maternal mortality rates in...
More »Civil Society Questions Anti-Naxal Operations
A fact finding team of many civil society organizations has reported widespread occurrences of murders, tortures and cases of police atrocities in Chhattisgarh in the name of combating Naxalism. It is also being alleged that in the name of their own security, journalists are being stopped from going to so called “combat zones” where security forces have launched an Operation Greenhunt to flush out armed Maoists. Fifteen members of the...
More »Shhh! It's a secret by Jug Suraiya
Should the Right to Information Act be renamed the Right to Ignorance Act? Despite the introduction of the RTI Act, India continues to be an information-poor and, consequently, ignorance-rich country. The official policy seems to be that public ignorance is sarkari bliss. Thanks to the Official Secrets' Act (one of the less desirable relics of British rule, under the colonial regime largely used to suppress nationalist sentiment and activity) India...
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