RTI activists are angry with the state government for having appointed three commissioners to the Tamil Nadu Information Commission just before the model code of conduct came into force, with zero transparency. The government announced the appointments on Tuesday, hours before the election commission announced the poll date. Already, the appointment of former chief secretary KS Sripathi as the chief information commissioner is in a legal tangle after RTI activists...

The children of Khatima village couldn't take it anymore. The headmaster in their government school had been turning up drunk for over five years. That is, when he turned up at all. Last year, they finally took matters into their own hands. Activist Devendra Ojha had held a cartooning workshop with them. The comics produced by the children were photocopied and pasted all over the village: behind rickshaws, near the...

Two aides of economist Jean Drèze were targeted by unscrupulous contractors, suspected to have been backed by Maoists, for exposing rampant corruption in the Centre’s flagship rural job scheme in a Latehar village late last night. Niyamat Ansari died after he was beaten up mercilessly by a 12-member gang at Jerua village, 130km from the state capital, but his friend and colleague Bhukan Singh had a narrow escape as he wasn’t...

One of the big surprises in the 2011-2012 budget was that spending on the country’s landmark rural employment program remained flat, disappointing activists who see it as a way of redressing growing wealth disparities. The program has since 2006 guaranteed 100 days of work a year for unskilled laborers to build rural infrastructure like irrigation ditches and roads. The Congress party has made the program, known as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural...

For most schemes, the increases have been nominalThe Union Budget goes eloquent about the virtues of the flagship schemes of the UPA government but Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee has kept a tight fist while allocating funds, whether for the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) or those under the umbrella of Bharat Nirman.Though the finance minister referred to wages under the 100-day employment programme having being increased after being indexed...