What kept Prime Minister Manmohan Singh busy after securing minister A Raja’s resignation on the night of November 14 last year?   He was writing a reply to National Advisory Council chairperson Sonia Gandhi’s letter on the practice of manual scavenging. On November 15, he wrote to her that he was asking the Minister of Social Justice & Empowerment to “examine how to strengthen” implementation of the Employment of Manual Scavengers and...

Information Commissioner Shailesh Gandhi sold off his business in 2003 to do something relevant. The Indian Institute of Technology-Mumbai alumnus soon became a prolific user of the Right To Information Act and filed more than 800 RTI applications. He was appointed the Information Commissioner at the Central Information Commission, New Delhi, in 2008. In this freewheeling interview with rediff.com's Priyanka, Gandhi says that appellants must understand that law describes 'information' as something...

-The Hindu   The Communist Party of India on Friday urged the government not to club the caste census with survey work on poverty apprehending there would be inordinate delay in compiling the caste data in the absence of any timeline for completion of the task. Raising the issue in the Rajya Sabha through a special mention, Syed Azeez Pasha (CPI) said that while the government had inserted the caste column into...

Two ambitious government projects are competing for your fingerprints. While the National Population Register (NPR) of the Census office has been tasked with the mandate of providing biometric-based identity cards to all Indian residents, Nandan Nilekani's Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has sought more funds to expand the UID enrollment exercise to virtually cover the entire population over the age of five years. According to the original, but little-known proposal,...

-Press Information Bureau   Bageshwar in Uttarakhand has reported minimum Crude Birth Rate (CBR) of 14.7 while Dhemaji in Assam has reported the Minimum Crude Death Rate (CDR) of 4.5 as per the findings of the Annual Health Survey (AHS) in 284 districts of nine states. The survey results were released by Secretary, Health & Family Welfare Shri K. Chandramouli at a press conference in New Delhi today in the presence of...