Information Commissioner Shailesh Gandhi sold off his business in 2003 to do something relevant. The Indian Institute of Technology-Mumbai alumnus soon became a prolific user of the Right To Information Act and filed more than 800 RTI applications. He was appointed the Information Commissioner at the Central Information Commission, New Delhi, in 2008. In this freewheeling interview with rediff.com's Priyanka, Gandhi says that appellants must understand that law describes 'information' as something...

In two hundred cities across India on Tuesday, thousands of college students, young executives and housewives joined a campaign that asks the government to enact an important new law to fight corruption. At the centre of the movement is respected social activist Anna Hazare who has begun a hunger strike that he says will not end till the government proves its commitment to the Jan Lokpal Bill (Citizen's Ombudsman Bill). What...

NGOs To No Go’s     * NGOs have mushroomed; so have instances of misappropriation of funds     * Not disclosing expenditure and receipts; nor revealing who funds them     * Not setting up NGO for the task it was funded for     * Flocking to 'hot' topics, inviting accusations of singing to industrialists’ tunes     * For every NGO supporting a cause, another springs up against that cause *** NGO numbers     * 3.3 million Number of NGOs...

The people are showing who the boss is. The weapon in their hands is the internet, which, in the last five days, has seen frantic activism against "power brokering" by journalists in collusion with corporate groups and top government politicians. It all began with the publication of sensational tapes related to the 2G spectrum scam by two magazines over the weekend. Two high-profile journalists, Barkha Dutt and Vir Sanghvi, whose names...

The Italian-born English poet Humbert Wolfe described the press of his day in the following terms: ''You cannot hope to bribe or twist, Thank God! The British journalist. But seeing what the man will do Unbribed, there’s no occasion to.'' Things have only got worse in this matter in the eighty-odd years since these words were written, and they have probably got worse in many more places. And so the age-old dilemma between freedom of...