-The Hindu Office cites ‘diversion of resources’ clause; former CIC Wajahat Habibullah terms it ‘misuse of Act’. The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) has denied a Right to Information request related to the PM-CARES Fund on the grounds that providing it would “disproportionately divert the resources of the office.” However, a High Court judgment and multiple orders of the Central Information Commission (CIC) have previously held that, under the RTI Act, this rationale...

-The Hindu With few job opportunities in villages, migrant labourers who had left the city in March are returning in droves The Anand Vihar bus terminal — where thousands of migrant workers had assembled four months back in a desperate bid to return to their home towns after a nationwide lockdown was announced — is again abuzz with labourers, but this time they are desperate to return to the city. With the lockdown...

-PTI/ The Hindu Finance Ministry’s draft guidelines state that appointments by way of nomination based on the credentials of past service and not through open market advertisement, should not be made as a “matter of practice and must be kept at bare minimum“. The Finance Ministry is working on norms to regulate salary paid to retired central government employees re-appointed on contract and has proposed keeping nomination-based appointments at “bare minimum“. Please click...

Huge sums of money are allocated for the rural and agrarian sectors by the Union Government in its annual budget every year, and rightly so. But in the absence of an adequate number of officials in rural areas, can the various schemes and programmes of the government be implemented properly? We will find the answer if we think about this issue deeply and the answer that would emerge should bother...

-The Hindu Maharashtra, Gujarat, West Bengal with most number of cases among staff nurses Maharashtra, Gujarat and West Bengal have the maximum number of COVID positive staff nurses in the country and also the highest fatality rate, the Trained Nurses Association of India (TNAI) said on Thursday. TNAI, the largest nursing association in the country, released data for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic, indicating that 509 nursing staff were...