The finance ministry has asked the telecom department not to entrust state-owned BSNL with the Rs 20,000-crore project to build a nationalbroadband network to take high-speed internet to the hinterlands. It has recommended that a special purpose vehicle (SPV), consisting of many mobile phone companies, be entrusted with implementing this project, while adding that all stakeholders should be chosen through a transparent and competitive bidding process. The telecom department had identified...

Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan has said that he would write to the CBI again to take up the Shehla Masood murder case. The government had recommended an inquiry by the CBI two days after the murder, but the agency had not yet responded. Talking to mediapersons at his residence Wednesday, Chouhan also announced a reward of Rs one lakh to anybody giving clues leading to arrest of Shehla's murderer. An RTI...

Shehla Masood had to die because the state couldn’t protect her Shehla Masood’s worst fears came to pass on August 16: she was shot dead in front of her house in Bhopal at around 11 am. An RTI activist who had taken up a variety of issues, from good governance, transparency and police reforms to tiger conservation, and who had been collecting evidence using the RTI Act since 2005, she...

Mahesh Kundu paid 2,500 rupees for a driving licence, Rupam Bhatia 5,000 rupees to be admitted to hospital and Vishrant Chandra 6,000 rupees for a marriage certificate. These are the commonplace bribery stories experienced by middle-class Indians who have poured into the streets to say "enough is enough". Corruption in India is as old as the Ramayana, when the evil demon Ravana bribed a guardian of hell to avoid punishment in...

In the current hullabaloo about the lok pal bill and the Anna agitation, one question has frequently been raised, both by protagonists of the Congress and the government and by constitutionalists and legal experts: however laudable the goals of Anna and his supporters, aren’t the methods adopted by them illegitimate? Doesn’t a fast unto death amount to blackmail of the legislature? Isn’t it an attempt by the unelected to usurp...