Provoked by the reiteration by Supreme Court of its offer to drop the contempt charge against Prashant Bhushan if he apologised for levelling allegations of corruption against the Judiciary provoked his father Shanti Bhushan on Wednesday to repeat the contemptuous charges. He would rather go to jail than seek apology, declared Bhushan senior, former Union law minister. The senior Bhushan spoke out of turn, brushing aside repeated requests from a Bench...

DALIT THEOLOGY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY — Discordant Voices, Discerning Pathways: Edited by Sathianathan Clarke, Deenbandhu Manchala, Philip Vinod Peacock; Oxford University Press, YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 745. Although Christian missionaries of various denominations have been active in India for several centuries, the 1941 Census placed the number of Christians in colonial India at just 1.6 per cent of the population. This clearly indicates that the...

The trend of government officials approaching the High Court against the Central Information Commission's (CIC) decision imposing fines on PIOs for delay in information to applicants under the RTI Act has started a debate amongst the RTI activists. Activists said very few information commissioners have levied monetary fine on the Public Information Officers (PIOs), who do not comply with the provisions of the Right to Information (RTI) Act. And now the...

Denmark (Rank 1) Denmark along with two other countries have been ranked as the world's least corrupt countries. With a score of 9.3, Denmark has consistently topped the Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index. The country has a strong tradition of openness to global trade and investment, and transparent and efficient regulations are applied evenly in most cases. Denmark also boasts an efficient, independent Judiciary that protects property rights, and the level of corruption is...

The case of the Food Security Bill gets curiouser and curiouser.  What started off as a fight between universalization and targeting has ended (or so it would seem) in a complete victory in the National Advisory Council, Government of India (NAC) for targeting through universalization (if such a thing was possible), with the honourable exception of Prof Jean Dreze, who has to be commended for his ‘note of disagreement’. On...