Professor Arjun Appadurai is a Mumbaikar at heart; coming to the city is an annual pilgrimage for this internationa­lly renowned cultural theorist and anthropologist. Appadurai, 62, who studied in Mumbai’s Elphinstone College, is currently Goddard Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. He has been consultant and advisor to a wide range of public and private foundations such as The Smithsonian. In his seminal work Disjuncture and...

The Right to Information Act (RTI) can be used in different ways not only to expose corruption in government Offices and public sector enterprises but also to force private NGOs and societies under Section 2(f) of the act to cough up information. Using the tool, noose can be tightened around those private agencies that try to fool people in the name of being associated with government-sponsored schemes. The option available in the...

The EC strikes out at paid news, but what it has seen is just the tip of the iceberg It’s getting bigger by the day. If the sheer number of notices sent by the Election Commission to candidates and media houses is any indication, paid news is big news in the assembly elections in Punjab. By the time polling came to a close on January 30, the commission’s media monitoring committees...

-The Economic Times Surprised at "missing" records of correspondence between the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed relating to the 1975 Emergency proclamation, the Central Information Commission (CIC) has directed the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) to retrieve and preserve the relevant files.  The transparency panel also sought an enquiry by the PMO into how the records relating to "such an important event in the history of post-independent India"...

-The Telegraph Calcutta High Court today passed an interim order restraining the Bengal government from de-recognising police associations and evicting them from their Offices across the state. The bench stayed the government decision till February 9, when it asked the state home department to appear with documents related to the de-recognition order. “The court wants to see the papers to ascertain what law had empowered the state to cancel the recognition of police...