The Right to Information Bill tabled in Parliament raises expectations to new levels by proposing a dedicated Information Commission for enforcement. Except, the commission is crippled at conception, with no direct penalizing powers. Prakash Kardaley comments.   The Central Right to Information Act as tabled before the Parliament is flawed. The penalty clause as proposed by the Sonia Gandhi chaired National Advisory Council (NAC) has been mercilessly diluted. The provision to keep...

Dozens of countries are taking part in a United Nations-sponsored effort to protect potentially life-saving centuries-old traditional medicines from bio-piracy by learning from India how to halt their misappropriation through international patents granted on non-original innovations. Representatives from more than 35 countries wrapped up a three-day meeting in New Delhi today that discussed emulating India’s Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL), a database documenting traditional medicinal treatment, concluding that such a mechanism...

State governments will have to abide by stricter rules to receive money from the centre for the rural employment scheme in the next financial year 2011-12. The centrally sponsored Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme ( MGNREGA )) has been one of the biggest drivers of rural consumption in the country. Stricter measures of fund release might lead to lower transfer to states at a time when high interest rates are...

Have right, will ask. That's the spirit of the growing number of information seekers in the state who are increasingly using the Right to Information (RTI) Act to know who's spending taxpayers' money — and how. Enacted in the summer of 2005, the RTI Act has seen a dramatic rise in its users with Karnataka registering a 10-fold increase in just four years. Latest figures by the Karnataka Information Commission, the...

A rising number of cases of blackmail of government officers by using the Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005, are being reported in RTI circles. Some of these cases came out in the open during the hearing of second appeals by the state information commissioner (SIC) Pune, Vijay Kuvelekar, recently. After a particularly gruelling hearing, a gram sevak from Satara broke down before the SIC and revealed that in her village...