-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Exhorting the government to take necessary steps to formulate statistics pertaining to construction workers, domestic workers and women workers in the unorganised sector, the Central Information Commission has recommended the ministry of labour and employment carry out the exercise in line with provisions meant to promote “transparency, Accountability and conformity” in the RTI Act. Then Information Commissioner, M Sridhar Acharyulu (who retired on November 21), in...

-IANS New Delhi: The Centre for Equity Studies on Tuesday released its annual report on exclusion of several sections of the society from mainstream and denial of public goods to them on the basis of their class or caste or ethnicity, otherwise ensured to every citizen by the Constitution. "These reports assemble evidence about the success of governments in India to ensure equitable access to what we call public goods to all...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: At a time when the government is mulling changes in the RTI Act, information commissioner Divya Prakash Sinha has suggested that investigative, intelligence and security agencies like NIA, CBI, IB and paramilitary forces should come under the purview of the law, saying there are adequate safeguards in the Act to keep sensitive information outside the public domain. The former IPS officer, who spent most of his...

-TheWire.in Most of the ‘reforms’ that are being introduced to address poor delivery of social services are silent on the issue of inadequate human resources, among other shortfalls in capacity. The poor performance of the public sector especially in education, health and other social services has been the subject of a lot of debates in the last few decades. The dominant narrative has attributed implementation failures to corruption, lack of Accountability, poor...

-Press release by People's Budget Initiative (PBI, http://www.pbiindia.net/) New Delhi: People's Budget Initiative (PBI) is a coalition of civil society organisations from across the country which promotes people’s voice in policy making processes related to government budgets in India. As part of its campaign on ‘Budget Justice for Disadvantaged Sections’, a national consultation on Budget Justice: Agenda for the Next Five Years was organized in New Delhi on 14th September, 2018....