THE LAUNCH of free market liberalisation in 1991 triggered widespread prosperity for the Indian middle classes, making them the showpiece of India’s muchf&ECIrc;ted economic boom. But little has ever changed for the bulk of the country’s poor, hundreds of millions of who continue to barely scrape through from day to day, doomed to extreme poverty and, consequently, malnutrition, disease and death. For decades, many among these millions have survived, however...

  KEY TRENDS    • A total of 7.55 lakh (755,247) RTI applications were received by the reporting public authorities in 2014-15. This is about 79,000 fewer RTI applications received in 2013-14. The CIC report notes this decline in the number of RTIs received. However almost 90,000 RTI applications were pending dECIsion at the start of the reporting year of 2014-15 *@ • Around 67 percent of men and 54 percent of women interviewed...