-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: Retired bureaucrats never retire. Stumped? A look at the information commissions, the transparency watchdogs, all over India reveals that they have become a re-employment arena for bureaucrats. Even though the Supreme Court has advised looking beyond retired civil servants for posts of information commissioners and Chief Information Commissioners, governments prefer retired bureaucrats over candidates with specialisations in other fields. An annual study by the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative,...

-Tehelka The country has egg on its face but not in its diet, as the Global Hunger Index reveals acute malnutrition Swachh Bharat Mission, if implemented in a holistic fashion, holds the key to curbing not only the problem of diarrhoeal deaths for which India holds the world record, but also malnutrition. However, the World Toilet Summit, which was held in the national capital this year as part of the Mission, was...

-The Hindu The appointments of Vijai Sharma as Chief Information Commissioner (CIC) and K.V. Chowdary as Chief Vigilance Commissioner (CVC), which have been a long time coming, also raise some concerns about the Narendra Modi government’s level of engagement with institutions that form the life breath of Indian democracy. The CIC presides over the Right to Information, crucial to a participatory democracy in making institutions accountable, while the CVC is tasked...

-The Indian Express Hyderabad/ Bhubaneshwar: In neighbouring Telangana, where the government has not declared any ex-gratia, 486 deaths have been reported from 10 districts where temperatures have been consistently high. Of the 1,636 “heat wave” deaths reported between May 15 and May 30 in Andhra Pradesh, only a little over one-third have so far been certified to have been caused by heat. The number of deaths being reported to mandal officers, Andhra Disaster...

Due to delay in the appointment of Chief Information Commissioner, the number of pending cases at the Central Information Commission (CIC) have gone up by nearly 1/3rd during the last 9 months. As per information furnished by the website of CIC (accessed on 29 May, 2015), the number of pending cases for disposal was 29,937 as on 22 August 2014, which after 9 months increased to 39,464 as on 22 May,...