The Lokpal (ombudsman) Bill would help fight corruption only at the centre and not in states where the magnitude of graft is alarming, cautions former Supreme Court judge Justice N. Santosh Hegde amid the escalating hype over the proposed legislation. Hegde, also the ombudsman for Karnataka, is part of the 10-member committee set up by the government to draft the new Bill following the hunger strike by reformer Anna Hazare that...

The union finance minister welcomed the gesture made by veteran BJP leader L K Advani for assuring the party’s support to the Lokpal Bill when tabled in the Parliament Union finance minister Pranab Mukherjee on Monday said India would endorse the UN convention on graft which the country signed in 2005. “India will ratify the UN convention on graft. There is a long legal procedure which is needed to be followed,” the...

Gandhi resorted to some 30 fasts, of which one-third were directed at himself, for ‘atonement’ or self-purification, one-third were directed against the raj and one-third at India’s social mores. A more honest trinity cannot be imagined. The latter two kinds of fasts were meant to make an impact on the ‘other side’; they were part-fasts and part- hunger strikes, part anashan and part bhukh-hartal, though he derived from each a sense...

Five civil society members of the joint drafting committee on Lokpal Bill including Anna Hazare will tomorrow declare their assets and liablities, a day before the panel will sit for the first time. A spokesperson for the civil society said Anna, Shanti Bhushan, Santosh Hegde, Prashant Bhushan and Arvind Kejriwal will release personal statement of their assets and liabilities tomorrow. "They will be meeting with fellow campaigners to discuss issues pertaining to...

700 million Indians have cell phones, but 638 million still don’t have access to proper sanitation. At this year’s South Asian Conference on Sanitation, social solutions to the problem were discussed, including “naming and shaming” and the CLTS programme which gets villagers to map the open areas where they defecate There can hardly be a bigger taboo than sanitation when it comes to the government, bureaucracy or even the people...