A 38-year-old Right to Information activist, Shiv Kumar Tiwari, who had carried out a sting operation on New Delhi Municipal Council officials and Delhi Police personnel for taking bribe leading to several arrests and also filed a complaint in the sensational MCD “ghost employees” case, has gone missing under mysterious circumstances from Ghazipur here. Mr. Tiwari, a florist who owns “Tiwari Flower.com” on Baba Kharak Singh Marg in Connaught Place, had...

Kanak Dixit: We have with us Aruna Roy, from Devdungri village in Rajasthan, who has, among other things, been able to take the Right to Information (rti) from janasunuwais, or public hearings at the village level, all the way to national legislation that encompasses all of India. It is a movement that is truly global in scale. Aruna, a question that has been troubling me quite a bit in the context...

-The Times of India Six months after it began probing the murder of rti activist Shehla Masood in Bhopal, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Tuesday said it has solved the case arresting two people, including an interior designer, Zahida Pervez. CBI sources said Pervez was the key conspirator in the murder, adding that she had hired a Kanpur hitman called Imran Ali to kill Masood. Imran was nabbed in Kanpur....

The time spent by government officials replying to rti is so little that it cannot be a pretext for them to shirk that task In August 2011, the Supreme Court made an observation which had some unintended consequences on the Right to Information (rti) process. The judgement by Justice R.V. Raveendran is turning out to be a seemingly legitimate excuse for government officials to restrict information.  Aditya Bandopadhyay went to court when...

At a time when the Congress-led UPA government has been battling with Team Anna over a comprehensive anti-corruption legislation, the Central Information Commission (CIC) has taken on the government and the judiciary over the transparency issue saying not even a single public authority has been following disclosure norms.  Even six years after the implementation of the Right to Information Act 2005, the final appellate authority for the legislation feels that the...