The government says the CBI was taken out of RTI purview as it gathers intelligence and safeguards our economic security. Doesn’t the RTI already have provisions against giving out sensitive information? Section 8(1) of the RTI Act gives all the protection these agencies need. If the CBI does not want to reveal certain aspects of their investigation, they can do so as guided by the RTI Act. There are provisions made...
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AG cited CBI intel job to back RTI exemption by Maneesh Chhibber
Attorney General Goolam Vahanvati vetted the Centre’s plan to take the CBI out of the purview of the RTI Act on the ground that it was also involved in intelligence-gathering as well as safeguarding the country’s economic security. And the government cited this opinion to overrule senior functionaries, including some members of the Committee of Secretaries headed by Cabinet Secretary K M Chandrasekhar, who had cautioned against such a move. Now,...
More »The Tyranny of AFSPA and Why it a Scar on Democracy by Babloo Loitongbam
This paper was presented at the Regional Workshop on War on Terror and Asian Democracy 17 May 2011, Kim Dae-Jung Convention Centre, South Korea organised by Solidarity for Democratization Movement in Asia (SDMA) Introduction In the discourse on terrorism and counter terrorism, September 11 stands as a watershed because of the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001. Government of India (GoI) also took full advantage of the ‘War on Terror’...
More »Govt decides to keep CBI outside RTI purview by Devesh Kumar
In a decision that is certain to generate a lot of heat, the Manmohan Singh government has exempted the CBI, the country's premier investigating agency, from providing information under the Right to Information Act . A notification to this effect was issued by the government on Thursday after the proposal got the Union Cabinet's green signal, placing the agency among a select category of institutions that have been kept outside...
More »Low awareness of MNREGA in state, says study by Nagesh Prabhu
The awareness of the Centre's ambitious rural job scheme — the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA) — varies across different regions of the State and only 56.33 per cent of the households are aware of the scheme. Evaluation of the impact of the processes in the MNREGA in Karnataka (2011), conducted by the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bangalore, for the State Government reveals that there have...
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