The Chhattisgarh legislative assembly has decided to charge Rs 500 as application fee to acquire information on the secretariat of the Vidhan Sabha under the Right to Information (RTI) Act. This is 50 times more than the application fee of Rs10 that is prescribed or charged in various government departments across the country. Details on the attendance of the MLAs, expenses incurred on each MLA per day during the session of...

-The Times of India   With complaints of arbitrariness in hearing of cases piling up, the Central Information Commission last week began listing out pending cases before each commissioner on its website. Cases pending before chief information commissioner Satyananda Mishra and information commissioner Shailesh Gandhi have already been uploaded while the other commissioners are likely to follow soon. This is the first time that an information commission has displayed at least a...

The CIC on his recent remark that if the legislature had its way, there would have been an express provision in the RTI Act to exclude the office of the CJI Chief Information Commissioner (CIC) Satyananda Mishra recently remarked that if the legislature had its way, there would have been an express provision in the law to exclude the office of the Chief Justice of India from the RTI Act....

An MGNREGA programme officer, currently posted at Bahadurganj in Kishanganj district, has landed in the soup following disclosure about his qualification under the Right To Information (RTI) Act. MGNREGA programme officer Ranjit Kumar Pramanik secured the job allegedly on the basis of a 'fake' MBA certificate, according to a response to the RTI. The officer had submitted MBA certificate claiming that he had obtained the MBA degree from L N Mishra...

-The Times of India   The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Saturday doubled the cash reward of Rs five lakh to Rs 10 lakh for information on the murder of RTI Activist Shehla Masood, who was shot dead outside her house in Bhopal on August 16, 2011. Though the agency had registered a case against unnamed persons on September 3, 2011, it increased the reward money since the motive behind the murder...