-PTI   In order to deal better with growing intra-departmental RTI queries, Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) has decided to train its over 100 officials on different matters related to Right to Information Act. DoPT, which acts as a nodal agency to oversee implementation of the transparency law, has decided to train a total of 104 Central Public Information Officers and Appellate Authorities. The decision was taken after some of...

The Joint Lokpal Bill Drafting Committee concludes its meetings without any agreement on major issues. ON June 21, as the five government representatives and the five civil society members of the Joint Lokpal Bill Drafting Committee ended their deliberations after exchanging their versions of the draft Lokpal Bill, the battle lines were clearly drawn. The government was in no mood to agree with the civil society members led by Anna...

Rather than shutting its doors on ‘civil society’, the government should be thanking its stars that the latter wants to make law, not war. Distributing tee-shirts with this slogan would be a better use of the government’s ‘hearts and minds’ funds than the integrated action plan to counter Naxals, or the army’s tourism trips to Pune for Kashmiri schoolgirls. The UPA regime has been unprecedented for the spate of legislation that...

-The Economic Times   The Central Information Commission (CIC) has summoned CBI officials for failure to give reasons on why the Ambani brothers were not chargesheeted in the call re-routing case. The CBI had last year filed a chargesheet against five Reliance Industries' executives in a case related to passing off of international calls as local calls and causing revenue loss to the government. Information commissioner Shailesh Gandhi has asked the CBI public...

-The Economic Times   All public data-from that on glacier meltdowns to monsoon charts to benami land--will be freely available at the click of a mouse with the launch of a national data portal next month. Modeled on US chief information officer Vivek Kundra's Data.gov.us project, the science and technology ministry's portal-- data.gov.in--aims to democratize data, and make the government more "open". "We plan to launch data.gov.in by next month. Once the National...