They operate from a cramped floor in a commercial building near Bhikaji Cama Place in Delhi, and work on a heavy roster of hearings day in and day out. However, the five posts of information commissioners in the central information commission have drawn applications from all categories of people — from scientists, lawyers and journalists to, most of all, retired or soon-to-be retired bureaucrats.   Despite the heavy workload and its low-profile...

-PTI   The Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI), an autonomous public private partnership project headed by the Prime Minister's cardiologist K Srinath Reddy, comes under the ambit of the RTI Act as it is substantial financed by the government, the CIC has held.  The PHFI came into existence in the year 2006 with an initial fund corpus of Rs 200 crore, in which government had contributed Rs 65 crore, the Central Information...

There is a rush to cash in on micronutrient deficiency in India through fortification of food Andhra Pradesh Foods, a state government enterprise, is ramping up its fortified food production capacity. It provides ready-to-eat and ready-to-cook foods like upma mix, sweet porridge and khichdi mix, fortified with iron, zinc and other vitamins, to infants and pregnant and lactating women under the Centre’s Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS). The effort to double its...

-ENS Economic Bureau   Estimates on black money stashed away by Indians is still very much a grey area. So when the CBI Director emphatically declared on Monday that $500 billion of illegal money belonging to Indians was deposited in tax havens abroad, the figure caused more than a mild flutter.   Mainly because the information currently available on the black money economy is way too disparate and vague. Considering the available evidence, the...

The recommendations of the Planning Commission’s High Level Expert Group on Access to Universal Healthcare are significant because they make explicit the need to contextualise health within the rights. However, the problem with the report is that it does not ask why many of the same recommendations that were made by previous committees have not been implemented. The HLEG neither recognises the problems, constraints and compulsions at the national, state...