-Scroll.in Records show that more than 250 Indians have been intimidated so far for using the law. Existing mechanisms to protect those who file RTIs are clearly failing. A day after the tenth anniversary of the implementation of the Right to Information Act in India, on June 21, a retired college professor and his adult daughter were accosted close to their home in the Burdwan district of West Bengal by a local...
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Curious case of missing RTI commissioners -Christin Mathew Philip
-The Times of India CHENNAI: The Right to Information (RTI) is turning into an increasingly opaque idea as more posts of the information commissioner are falling vacant. Vacancies for the post in the country increased from 14% in 2014 to 20% in 2015, reveals a nation-wide study conducted by Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI), an NGO. According to the report, the number of information commissioners in the country has been reduced from 120...
More »10 years of RTI Act: 39 activists dead, 275 harassed, says report -Chetan Chauhan
-Hindustan Times When Right to Information Activist Guru Prasad Shukla was beaten to death by fellow villagers last month, he became the 39th person to lay down his life for exercising the transparency law in its first decade. Another 275 people have reportedly been assaulted or harassed for invoking the law to raise uncomfortable questions before those in power. The 50-year-old Shukla had sought information about development work in his village and...
More »No Medicine for the Common ‘Jan’ -Archana Mishra
-Tehelka The NDA government’s move to open more Jan Aushadhi stores ignores the multitude of issues currently plaguing them Amidst the jostling crowd at the Guru Teg Bahadur Hospital in Shahdara, Delhi, is 68-year-old Suresh Chandra, holding his medical files on one hand and prescription letter on the other. Chandra, who is a lung disease patient, moves towards the Jan Aushadhi store, situated in the hospital premises. Chandra hopes that the government-run medical...
More »The UN Report on Out-of-School Kids is Bad News for India. The Real Picture May Be Worse -Kiran Bhatty
-TheWire.in The newly released UNESCO e-atlas on out-of-school children (OOSC) provides worrying evidence not only of the low priority being accorded to basic education across developing countries, but also by the developed world in terms of the aid given to education. As many as 124 million children and adolescents worldwide are out of school, 17.7 million – or 14 per cent – of whom are Indian. The rise in the number...
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