-Live Mint To maintain his constant stream of RTI petitions, Agrawal says he gets ideas from day-to-day observations, news reports, government insiders, whistle-blowers and journalists. In the summer of 1985, a cloth merchant in Chandni Chowk, the crowded market in the old quarters of Delhi, received a call in response to a letter he had written to the papers asking why his favourite weekly television serial, Rajani, could not be aired daily...

Fourteen national and international non-government organisations and academic centres have called for reforms in what they say are excessively-broad exemptions granted to the government on national security issues by the Right to Information (RTI) Act. To guide decision-making on information requests relating to national security, the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI), along with other groups, is in the process of formulating “guidelines” to bring about consensus on the extent of restrictions...

-The Times of India   In an open house organised at the Ahmedabad Management Association (AMA), the police and citizens came face to face on the issue of transparency in police stations and the need for proactive disclosures under RTI Act. This meet was jointly organised by Society for Women Action And Training Initiative (SWATI) and Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) on Thursday.  The meet agreed that the RTI Act can become an...

Six months before India's human rights gets reviewed at the United Nations, the Working Group on Human Rights (WGHR) in India released a report painting a dismal picture of its rights record. The U.N. Human Rights Council examines the rights record of its members on a rotational basis every four years through a peer review process, the Universal Periodic Review (UPR). Reports by the civil society, U.N. agencies and the country...

Do you know that the highest number of corruption cases are registered in Maharashtra (4566) and the lowest in West Bengal (only 9) between 2000 and 2009? Do you also want to know how much property has been recovered from the corrupt in different states of India in the past ten years? But how does one systematically track corruption? How to get details of the number of cases going on...