A long-pending demand of civil society activists and NGOs, who are campaigning for probity, accountability, and transparency in public life, is going to be fulfilled soon. A welcome move has been made by the Government to enumerate and publish data on crimes committed against media persons, Right to Information activists, and whistleblowers in the forthcoming edition of Crime in India, which is published annually by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB)...

-Hindustan Times When right to information activist Guru Prasad Shukla was beaten to death by fellow villagers last month, he became the 39th person to lay down his life for exercising the transparency law in its first decade. Another 275 people have reportedly been assaulted or harassed for invoking the law to raise uncomfortable questions before those in power. The 50-year-old Shukla had sought information about development work in his village and...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Tweaks the home ministry has proposed to rules governing foreign funding for NGOs will leave these organisations at the mercy of the government's unilateral interpretations of what violates an undefined idea of "national interest", social activists have said. More than the suggested new rules themselves, put up on the ministry website for feedback yesterday, it's the mandatory declaration proposed for NGOs at the end that critics have termed...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The Delhi government on Monday sought to downplay its health advisory allowing "two-finger test" on rape survivors. It stated that the advisory was misinterpreted and they will come up with a fresh notification to completely ban the archaic test for ascertaining sexual assault. "We want to make it clear that finger test is banned completely for ascertaining sexual assaults. More scientific methods will be adopted for...

Due to delay in the appointment of Chief Information Commissioner, the number of pending cases at the Central Information Commission (CIC) have gone up by nearly 1/3rd during the last 9 months. As per information furnished by the website of CIC (accessed on 29 May, 2015), the number of pending cases for disposal was 29,937 as on 22 August 2014, which after 9 months increased to 39,464 as on 22 May,...