-The Deccan Herald   The Central Information Commission has held that the Right to Information (RTI) Act cannot be used to get details of orders or judgments from the Supreme Court or the High Courts.  Significantly, the transparency panel clarified that since the Supreme Court as well as High Courts prescribed their own set of rules for providing judicial records, the information seekers could not use the RTI Act for that purpose. “We have...

The Madhya Pradesh Chief Information Commissioner has ruled that the elite Arera Club of Bhopal, associated chiefly with bureacucrats and the city's wealthy, shall be under the purview of the Right to Information Act. Chief Information Commissioner Padmapani Tiwari in an order passed on Thursday, rejected the club officials' contention that the club was a private body and did not fall under the purview of the RTI act. The CIC order came...

Has the explosion of media in India been a mixed blessing? With more than 70,000 newspapers and over 500 satellite channels in several languages, Indians are seemingly spoilt for choice and diversity. India is already the biggest newspaper market in the world - over 100 million copies sold each day. Advertising revenues have soared. In the past two decades, the number of channels has grown from one - the dowdy state-owned broadcaster...

-PTI    India along with China, North Korea and Israel has low levels of transparency on nuclear materials and security, an independent report has said. "Four countries have particularly low levels of transparency, specifically Israel, North Korea, India and China, on materials and materials security," said Page Stoutland, vice president for nuclear materials at the Washington-based independent Nuclear Threat Initiative. The Nuclear Threat Initiative, in a project led by former US senator Sam Nunn...

To banish hunger and malnutrition from the country, Parliament is likely to pass the National Food Security Bill (NFSB). In our earlier article on this issue, Can we Afford Rs 6-Lakh-Cr Food Subsidy Bill in 3 Yrs? (ET, December 17, 2011), we concentrated on the likely financial implication that we estimated at roughly Rs 6,00,000 crore over a period of three years. In this piece, we address the operational challenges...