-Outlook Transparency promotes democracy, more the reason for political parties to come under RTI Act's purview There was great public outrage when legislators in Mumbai beat up an assistant police inspector because he stopped an MLA's car for speeding on the Bandra-Worli sealink. The sentiment was: What arrogance! How can lawmakers have so little respect for the laws they themselves made? However, the amendment in Parliament aimed at removing political parties...
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India officially undercounts all crimes including rape-Rukmini S
-The Hindu Only the ‘principal offence' in an FIR gets into NCRB data The National Crime Records Bureau, India's official source of crime data, is systematically undercounting virtually every crime in India on account of a statistical shortcoming, The Hindu has learnt. The December 16 gang rape, which prompted much examination of data on sexual assault in the country, will not even figure in NCRB data on rape owing to this statistical flaw. The...
More »Database error: Why Delhi's failed experiment shows government should not use them -M Rajshekhar
-The Economic Times In the leaky system of welfare delivery, databases are the newest valve that governments are installing to ensure that benefits reach those-and only those -they are intended for. Since December 2012, for instance, the government of Madhya Pradesh has been appending on to the Centre's Socio Economic and Caste Census a host of household-level data: bank account numbers, NREGA card numbers, welfare entitlements, land ownership, whether their house is...
More »Lifestyle diseases to cost India $6 trillion, study estimates -Durgesh Nandan Jha
-The Times of India NEW DELHI: India's march towards being an economically stable nation is threatened not just by global financial issues. Poor health indicators pose an equally big threat. The Harvard School of Public Health has, in a study on economic losses due to non-communicable diseases (NCDs), estimated that the economic burden of these ailments for India will be close to $6.2 trillion for the period 2012-30, a figure that is...
More »Gas-guzzling government talks austerity, burns crores -Sidhartha & Surojit Gupta
-The Times of India NEW DELHI: While ministers toy with all kinds of ideas to curb consumption of oil, including bizarre ones such as shutting down petrol pumps at night, it might help if they looked inwards. For, the biggest and most profligate oil consumer in the country is the government itself. Petrol flows like water in the government. Not just ministers and officials of the central and state governments, even PSUs...
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