Asking questions can cost your life in India - even if the right to solicit information is protected by law. Amar Nath Deo Pandey is luckier - in less than a week, he appears to have escaped two attempts on his life in a nondescript town in India's most populous state, Uttar Pradesh. More than five years after the introduction of a landmark law that allows Indians to access information held by...
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India’s Nuclear Neros by Praful Bidwai
The colossal hubris, ignorance and smugness of India’s nuclear czars take one’s breath away. The day Japan’s crisis took a decisive turn for the worse, with an explosion in a third Fukushima reactor and fresh radiation leaks, Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) secretary Sreekumar Banerjee declared that the nuclear crisis “was purely a chemical reaction and not a nuclear emergency as described by some section(s) of media”. Nuclear Power Corporation...
More »Centre to check on fund release for MGNREGA
To keep control over its flagship scheme ~ the much-hyped Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) ~ and to defeat its non-Congress regimes in various states, the Centre has given itself powers to check releasing funds due to ineffective implementation. In a six-point instruction to states, the ministry of rural development has said that Audit teams and media reports have revealed “anomalies” in the implementation of the MGNREGA. “If the...
More »Shillong RTI Convention concludes
Going with its slogan: “Our money our right,” the Shillong declaration of the 3rd National Right to Information Convention today resolved that the Central Government must subject “all public expenditure under social Audit.” It was by far one of the most crucial of the other 11 resolutions passed in the Shillong Declaration and was only included after the strong insistence of RTI activist, Aruna Roy. She was amply supported by some...
More »Too bad to swallow by Milind Murugkar , Bharat Ramaswami and Ashok Kotwal
The National Advisory Council (NAC) has now sketched out the “contours of a national food security bill”. The goal is worthy: “Protecting all children, women and men from hunger and food deprivation.” To some, the bill might appear utopian. The truth is worse. The bill reminds us of John Stuart Mill’s denunciation of a government policy of his day: “What is commonly called Utopian is something too good to be...
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