The government appears to be working towards an amicable solution on the question of who can collect biometric information data for the Indian population. There has been disagreement about whether this will be done by the UIDAI headed by Nandan Nilekani, or the National Population Register headed by Home Minister P. Chidambaram. It now seems that both may continue to collect data but share its use. When any country sets about...

PROFESSOR Mohan Gopal, director of the Rajiv Gandhi Institute for Contemporary Studies (RGICS), New Delhi, is a strong proponent of the government's Lokpal Bill. The RGICS provided key inputs to the making of the government's Lokpal Bill and the Constitution Amendment Bill. Prof. Mohan Gopal, a scholar in constitutional law, headed the National Judicial Academy, Bhopal, for five years and the National Law School, Bangalore. He was appointed by Parliament...

Greedy lawyers and lack of awareness condemn women undertrials twice over Kanimozhis All?     Total number of male and female convicts in India: 1,23,941; Number of undertrials: 2,50,204     Number of female prisoners: 15,406; Female undertrials: 10,687     Female prisoners compromise 4.1 per cent of the prison population     469 women convicts with their 556 children and 1,196 undertrials with their 1,314 children are in prisons across the country     Official capacity of prisons in...

-The Economic Times   The enacting of the Lokpal Bill has been deferred in the Rajya Sabha but that need not end the discussion on how focused the proposals are when it comes to tackling corruption. For instance, what exactly are the quotas in the Lokpal meant to do? If out of an eight-or-nine-member Lokpal, four or five should be from SCs, STs, OBCs, minorities and women, what is the message going...

The setting aside of 50% of seats in the proposed Lokpal for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Classes, women and minorities, triggered a sharp debate within parties today around a central, normative question: should social diversity, especially inclusion of minorities, weigh in an empowered body to “fight corruption?”   While the BJP has opposed it and Team Anna, caught off-guard on a sensitive political issue, has declined to comment, legal experts...