The ever-energetic Jairam Ramesh has unveiled a new land acquisition policy for discussion. He has taken on the difficult task of changing an old law whose implementation has led to a sorry mess in Nandigram, Singur and Noida, to mention only a few of the recent cases that have hit the headlines. India’s policy regime for managing land rights and land transactions is totally dysfunctional. Greedy politicians in state governments have...

A state data centre meant to be the backbone of launching much-needed e-governance initiatives has been hanging fire for the last two years and now looks like stuck for another six months at least for want of a building. An agreement to set up the centre, to come up under the aegis of National e-Governance Plan (NeGP), was signed with Sify Technologies in February, more than one and a half years...

The Supreme Court said the RTI Act is not meant to be a “tool for oppression” of public authorities, saying the nation cannot afford to have the honest public official bogged down with all and sundry requests unrelated to corruption. “The nation does not want a scenario where 75 per cent of the staff of public authorities spends 75 per cent of their time in collecting and furnishing information to applicants...

In the latest tug-of-war on the applicability of the Right to Information (RTI) Act on government decisions, the law ministry is set to challenge a Central Information Commission (CIC) ruling, directing it to accept the ownership of its legal opinions. The ministry is unhappy with the July 27 ruling of the CIC, in which the transparency watchdog had held that the legal advice tendered by it to various government departments cannot...

But impractical demands under Act will be counter-productive The right to information is a cherished right. Information and the right to information are intended to be formidable tools in the hands of responsible citizens to fight corruption and to bring about transparency and accountability, the Supreme Court has held. A Bench of Justices R.V. Raveendran and A.K. Patnaik gave this ruling (briefly reported on August 10) while allowing disclosure of answer sheets...