-PTI   Nearly six years after the Right to Information Act (RTI) was enacted, the Government has constituted a Special Task Force to ensure effective implementation of the Act and to bring in more transparency and accountability in governance. The task force is mandated to seek ways for effective implementation of Section 4 of the RTI Act for Proactive Disclosures by the public authorities and to explore the possibility of prescribing simple...

At home, the government is facing a barrage of allegations over corruption in public affairs, but here the Congress-led UPA-II was hailed for embracing an inclusive scheme like National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). On Tuesday, the United Nations released a Global Assessment Report (GAR), praising NREGA and asked other nations to emulate the programme that has helped empower millions of marginalized. In a power-point presentation made during the release of the...

Do you know that the highest number of corruption cases are registered in Maharashtra (4566) and the lowest in West Bengal (only 9) between 2000 and 2009? Do you also want to know how much property has been recovered from the corrupt in different states of India in the past ten years? But how does one systematically track corruption? How to get details of the number of cases going on...

Why are the erstwhile RTI campaigners so alarmed five years after it became law? Why so many dharnas, rallies, conventions and hunger-strikes all over again? Part of the reason is that the silent revolution that the RTI has spawned needs to be defended from surreptitious alterations and manipulations, and partly because the RTI activists are being threatened, harassed and assaulted by the corrupt and the powerful, often with the connivance...

The government wants to make its rural jobs guarantee programme more open to scrutiny and empower its beneficiaries by getting panchayats (village councils) to periodically disclose information about the scheme’s functioning in that area. To this end, the ministry of rural development has issued an advisory to village panchayats, making it mandatory for them to convene regular gram sabhas (village general bodies). The initiative is also aimed at making the scheme...