-The Hindu Journalists need to adopt a set of integrity measures in order to police the boundaries between the market and political power   Gina Rinehart, Australia’s richest person and the world’s Wealthiest woman, is seeking three board seats following her purchase of 18.7 per cent of Fairfax which owns most papers in Australia not controlled by Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd. There has already been considerable upheaval in two of the Fairfax papers...

Census 2011 data bring into the open Maharashtra’s terrible record in sex-selective abortions. In early June, Vijaymala Patekar, a mother of four girls, haemorrhaged to death at a hospital in Parli, Beed district, Maharashtra. She was reportedly in her second trimester of pregnancy. Her family had allegedly forced her to abort the foetus when they learnt it was a girl child. Sudam Munde, the doctor who performed the procedure, fled Parli but...

-The Hindu Most people remain at the mercy of a venal administration that, encouraged by the absence of an independent watchdog, exploits them relentlessly   The state of affairs in the country is characterised by rampant corruption at all levels leading to a breakdown in the rule of law and lack of accountability all around. One can say that there is a complete collapse of governance in the country. Something drastic needs to...

-The Hindu The CAG, after completing this month a detailed ‘internal appraisal’ of two of its most high-profile reports, has not just stood by its findings “regardless of media comments and the statements made by senior functionaries of the government,” but also substantiated them, citing additional crucial events. The internal assessment has been done on its reports on the 2G spectrum scam of November 2010 and Civil Aviation (Air India) of September...

Even seven years after the people-friendly Right-To-Information (RTI) Act was passed by Parliament around this time in 2005, people who use this legislation to expose corruption continue to live with fear of being threatened, thrashed and throttled to death in Gujarat. That the road to accessing information from government is still arduous in the Bharatiya Janata party-ruled state became evident once again earlier this week when an RTI activist of Amreli...