Though civil society has rejected the official Lokpal Bill with almost one voice, the confabulations in the run-up to Anna Hazare's hunger strike have brought out differences within activists on the alternative Jan Lokpal Bill. The differences had come to light at the two meetings held on April 3 and 4 to examine the provisions of the Jan Lokpal Bill espoused by Hazare, who began his fast unto death on April...

The Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council (NAC) and civil society groups are clearly not happy with the government's draft of the Lokpal Bill, intended to check corruption in high places. But a public consultation, a day ahead of the discussions that the NAC's Working Group on Transparency and Accountability is due to have with government representatives and others, demonstrated how difficult it will be to get a consensus on a...

The pressure on the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government to enact the Lokpal Bill to check corruption by public servants is mounting, 42 years after another government first attempted to create such a law, as civil society representatives and the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council (NAC) have joined hands to push for the early enactment of a tough law. On April 3, the National Campaign for People's Right to Information (ncpri)...

Why are the erstwhile RTI campaigners so alarmed five years after it became law? Why so many dharnas, rallies, conventions and hunger-strikes all over again? Part of the reason is that the silent revolution that the RTI has spawned needs to be defended from surreptitious alterations and manipulations, and partly because the RTI activists are being threatened, harassed and assaulted by the corrupt and the powerful, often with the connivance...

So why is the UPA hell-bent on killing its unique success story: the NREGA? Here's the inside narrative of the conspiracy. It took 47 days of a protest sit-in at Jaipur to make the state budge(1). It's notable that the objective of this protracted protest was not to coerce the Rajasthan government for an extra share of the state's resources, but to hold the government accountable to the Constitution and its...