A long-pending demand of civil society activists and NGOs, who are campaigning for probity, accountability, and transparency in public life, is going to be fulfilled soon. A welcome move has been made by the Government to enumerate and publish data on crimes committed against media persons, Right to Information activists, and whistleblowers in the forthcoming edition of Crime in India, which is published annually by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB)...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: For 10 months, the Narendra Modi administration withheld from the public the findings of a study by India's government and Unicef that charts "unprecedented" improvement in child malnutrition over the past decade but shows Gujarat in an unflattering light. Under pressure after The Economist reported the findings a fortnight ago, the government last week released the national-level data from the Rapid Survey on Children. But it is still...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Nearly 2% of the population of Delhi falls in the persons with disability category. However, 20 years after passing of the Persons with Disabilities Act 1995, there is no state policy on disability in place in the national capital. The Act was notified by the Delhi government in 2001, but successive governments have done little beyond that. While it took three years to just constitute the...

-The Indian Express SCOPE seeks list of ‘habitual seekers of queries’ from public sector enterprises, former CIC says existing rti law does not allow such segregation Central public sector companies are trying to identify people who repeatedly use the Right to Information (RT) route to ferret out information from them. Companies are trawling their records about such people and will match data to draw up a checklist. And they plan to use...

-NDTV New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi's pet project, the Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan, has cost thrown up an ad bill of nearly Rs. 100 crore, according to information revealed through a Right to Information or rti application.   The government has spent 94 crore only on print, radio and television ads to promote the cleanliness mission that PM Modi launched on Mahatma Gandhi's birth anniversary October 2 last year. The BJP-led government's bill matches...