-The Times of India MUMBAI: You can now request for a copy of a government employee's service book under the Right to Information (RTI) Act to examine his or her track record in discharging duties in the public service. In a first, Central Information Commissioner Annapurna Dixit last month directed the railways to supply a copy of the service book of a ticket examiner (TE) to RTI activist Chetan Kothari, saying...
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For more aware citizens, more accountable parties -Shailesh Gandhi
-The Indian Express Should political parties be brought under the RTI? Two former central information commissioners debate On reading The Indian Express editorial ('Party police', June 5) and Pratap Bhanu Mehta's article ('Party fixing', IE, June 6) about the CIC order declaring that six political parties are public authorities, I felt they had missed a crucial point. The decision of the commission has been based on the RTI Act. The act states...
More »Government ordered to disclose spend on Atal Bihari Vajpayee's treatment
-PTI New Delhi: The Central Information Commission has directed the Health Ministry to make public expenses incurred on the treatment of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee within 15 days. While hearing a petition of an Right to Information (RTI) applicant who sought details of funds spent on treatment of the 88-year-old ailing BJP leader, Chief Information Commissioner Satyananda Mishra said the cost incurred on the medical treatment of the former Prime...
More »What we need is not a food security Bill but a hunger elimination Act -Arvind Virmani
-The Times of India In the decade or so that i was at the Planning Commission, i always had advisory responsibility for the food ministry/public distribution system, among other issues of development policy. It did not take very long to find out that the fundamental problem with the system was about so-called "leakages" abetted by corruption: One soon learnt that the Food Corporation of India (FCI) was one of the most...
More »Politics in the time of sunshine -Ruchi Gupta
-The Hindu While the legitimacy of political parties depends on their acceptance of financial transparency under the RTI Act, their internal decision-making processes should be left alone The Central Information Commission (CIC) decision declaring political parties as public authorities under the Right to Information Act has again pit the political class against the people. Political parties have increasingly lost legitimacy due to opaque financing, cultivation of individuals with a criminal background, subversion of...
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