-The Telegraph New Delhi: Last year, the invitation card was printed thrice - first with the Prime Minister's name, next without his name and finally with his name. This time, the organisers have been spared the agony of uncertainty: the card has been printed without the Prime Minister's name. Narendra Modi will be skipping the Central Information Commission's annual convention for the first time since the Right to Information Act was enacted in...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Supreme Court had recently said security forces had no inherent right to shoot people, which suggests that yesterday's killing of the eight Simi operatives by Madhya Pradesh police went against that ruling. The court had held that even if a person was seen carrying weapons in a "disturbed" area, it did not automatically give the security forces the right to shoot him. Even the army had no blanket...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Centre plans to track every student enrolled in every private or government school in the country by their Aadhaar numbers to keep tabs on dropout rates. Those among the 26 crore students who do not have Aadhaar cards will be given a unique 18-digit number by which they will be tracked till they get their Aadhaar numbers. The idea behind the ID-based tracking system is to log the...

-The Hindu The overcrowding of prisons in the country is a long-standing problem that is seldom addressed effectively. Even though the Supreme Court has, from time to time, raised the issue of prison reforms in general, and that of overcrowding in particular, measures to decongest jails have been sporadic and half-hearted. The issue is once again in the news, with the Supreme Court bemoaning that prisons in Delhi and nine States...

-Hindustan Times The first decadal study conducted after the Right to Information (RTI) Act has revealed that over 1.75 crore applications have been filed with one-fourth being requests to the Centre. The study, conducted by Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, reveals that 27.2% (47.66 lakh) of the total RTIs filed between 2005 and 2015 were to the different ministries and departments under the Centre. This is a conservative estimate because many departments...