At a time when protest against corruption is making headlines across the country, crusaders for people’s rights are at the receiving end in Bihar. An RTI activist from Rohtas, Ashok Paswan (49), has allegedly received a threat to his life for seeking information on alleged financial irregularities in disbursement of loans to farmers by a nationalised bank in the district. “I received a call on my mobile around 5.30pm on Friday. The...

Leprosy is generally taken as almost a non-issue in the country now. But, the surprise is that there has been a spurt in leprosy cases this year. No one seems to be worrying aloud about it too much, except a strange old man from Japan who has made it his job to eradicate leprosy and empower leprosy-cured people in this country. Of course, he works on the same issue in...

-The Deccan Chronicle   Shashidhar Mishra could have spent his entire life as a street vendor in his native village at Begusarai, Bihar. But he decided to get the information kept in the government files unlocked by filing more than 1,000 RTI applications. The reward he got was death. He was killed in his native village by unidentified gunmen in February 2010. Mishra is among at least 16 RTI activists who have...

Until about a year ago, the number of Indians who knew the name of Kisan Baburao Hazare, popularly known as Anna Hazare, ran into a few thousand -- small change in a country of a billion people. The former army driver was known for his peculiar experiments of social reform in a village in Maharashtra, in western India. He had received national awards for his social work. By the end of...

Sections within civil society have reservations about Anna Hazare’s movement but the government’s failure to tap them may have lent credence to the impression that his group was speaking up for the entire nation. Although leaders like P. Chidambaram and Kapil Sibal have argued that no single group could claim to be the sole representative of civil society, the Centre has not seriously tried to open channels of communication with other...