-The Times of India MUMBAI: On the eighth anniversary of India's landmark transparency legislation today, data mined on the Right to Information (RTI) Act shows it is, indeed, India's sunshine law, with an estimated 40 lakh people using the Act during 2011-12, the latest year for which all-India data is available. The Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI), an independent organisation closely associated with the RTI legislation, data-mined annual reports filed by the...

-Outlook The faecal matter hits the rotary blades, politically-but we're still staring at a sanitation disaster "Indians defecate everywhere. They defecate mostly besides the railway tracks. But they also defecate on the beaches; they defecate on the hills; they defecate on the river banks; they defecate on the streets; they never look for cover." -V.S. Naipaul An Area of Darkness, 1964 Not...

-The Telegraph The human resource development ministry today rejected a demand by two state education ministers that the Centre frame a national policy prescribing a uniform salary structure for schoolteachers in states and rules for recruiting them. At a meeting of the Central Advisory Board of Education, the highest advisory body on education that has state education ministers as members, Chhattisgarh's Brijmohana Agrawal and Bihar's P.K. Shahi said the HRD ministry should...

-The Indian Express Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has more than one reason to cheer the Raghuram Rajan committee report's ranking of states on composite development. Apart from being put close to the bottom of the ladder in the new index of underdevelopment, Bihar also scores near the top in "performance", that is, the reduction of underdevelopment - a most sensible parameter introduced in the report - far ahead of Narendra...

-The Hindu ‘Victims of communal carnage still struggling, socially and financially' Forbesganj/Bhagalpur: Bhajanpur village is a few kilometres off Bihar's showcase ‘four-lane,' as drivers call the highway, a far cry from the State's back-breaking roads of the past, near Forbesganj town. Residents tell us that those affected by the kaand incident, of two years ago, live a little ahead, in the Ansari basti. A bumpy ride across the village leads to Ale Rasool...