-Press statement by Right to Food Campaign dated 19 November, 2018 At least two more persons died of starvation in Jharkhand in the last 25 days. This takes the total number of hunger deaths in the state to 17, since September 2017. The most recent victim is 45-year old Kaleshwar Soren who died of hunger and destitution on 11 November in Mahuatanr village of Jama block of Dumka district. A fact...

-The Hindu Outgoing Central Information Commissioner Sridhar Acharyulu flags the impact of growing vacancies in the Commission Central Information Commissioner Sridhar Acharyulu, who took on the Prime Minister’s Office and the Reserve Bank of India in a case dealing with the non-disclosure of wilful defaulters of major bank loans, warned on his last day hearing RTI appeals that by December, he and three other CICs would retire, leaving the Central Information Commission...

-The Indian Express The request for information has consistently increased from just eight in the first six months of 2013 to 16,580 in the first half of 2018. While the Government has steadily decreased its requests for content to be taken off Facebook, there has been a surge in its requests for “information” and “user accounts”. Since 2015, there has been an estimated 63% increase in Facebook accounts in India and...

-Hindustan Times But the danger of allowing ingress to nationally critical sectors, like telecommunications, to countries that are not friendly must now be a matter of immediate national concern The debate on whether or not to censor information has been going on for centuries. The term ‘censor’ in Roman times originally referred to the function of special magistrates assigned to supervise public morals and, so long as this remained the remit, the...

-The Telegraph Corruption and traditional attitudes are major reasons why 196 million Indians are chronically undernourished One is what one eats. A study by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization confirms that poor-quality diet poses a greater threat to public health across the world than malaria, tuberculosis or measles and that diet-related factors account for six of the top nine ailments on the global burden of disease. This is worrying for...