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...

Denying any rift between Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee and Home Minister P Chidambaram, Corporate Affairs Minister Veerappa Moily today called for a “national debate” on the scope of the Right to Information Act (RTI), saying it “transgresses into the independent functioning of the government”. This came in the context of Janata Party leader Subramanian Swamy citing a Finance Ministry note that has brought the spotlight on Chidambaram’s role in the 2G...

New research from Navdanya and from the US Union of Concerned Scientists proves that Bt cotton yields are actually a third of what Monsanto claims. Genetic engineering is not going to help feed the world, writes Vandana Shiva, but it is going to harm public health and ecosystems We have been repeatedly told that genetically engineered (GE) crops will save the world. They will save the world by increasing yields and...

-The Indian Express   Weighing in on the current debate on allowing voters the right to recall their representatives, the chief election commissioner has flagged off the destabilisation this could bring to the system. As the person in charge of overseeing free and fair elections in the country, he understandably focused on the wherewithal required to sustain such easy recourse to votes to recall legislators and elect their replacements that some civil...

-The Hindu   Rattled by the emerging evidence that police resorted to indiscriminate firing at a mosque, the Congress-led government removed the Bharatpur Collector and the Superintendent of Police and decided to hand over the inquiry into Wednesday's violence in Gopalgarh to the Central Bureau of Investigation. Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot also announced a judicial inquiry into the incidents in the eastern Rajasthan town by a retired High Court Judge at a high-level...