Chief information commissioner (CIC) Wajahat Habibullah on Sunday said rural people in Rajasthan are more aware about the Right to Information (RTI) Act. RTI is the only tool which compels Politicians as well as bureaucrats to maintain transparency in their functioning. Habibullah was speaking at a seminar on How RTI is Useful To Eradicate Corruption from Politics organised by Citizen Council and PUCL. "The whole world is looking towards our...
More »SEARCH RESULT
India's 'revolutionary' RTI Act fails to reach the poor
A law empowering Indians to seek information from government to promote accountability and transparency has brought change to urban India, but has largely left out the country's rural poor, social activists say. The Right to Information (RTI) Act - similar to the Freedom of Information Act in the United States - was enacted almost five years ago and is aimed at providing a practical way for all citizens to access...
More »Media has lost its sense of priorities: Sainath
Pointing out that a disconnect exists between mass media and mass reality in India today, P. Sainath, Rural Affairs Editor of TheHindu, said the media had lost its sense of priorities and was out of touch with the problems of a vast section of the population of the country. He was delivering the Silver Jubilee Lecture on “Mass media: But where are the masses?” at the Indira Gandhi National Open University...
More »Controlling Inflation by Dipankar Dasgupta
The Union budget estimates the nominal rate of growth for the Indian economy to be 12.5 per cent during the current fiscal. While it is impossible to figure out the manner in which this number was arrived at, the government has predicted further that the inflation-adjusted real growth rate for the same year will be eight per cent. Simple arithmetic requires that the difference between the nominal and real growth...
More »Gold Rush by Venkitesh Ramakrishnan
ALMOST all the maladies afflicting the Indian mining industry have manifested themselves forcefully in the mineral-rich State of Jharkhand. Indiscriminate exploitation of natural resources, large-scale displacement of tribal people, and the rise of a mining lobby with immense political clout are only a few of these. Of course, in the last decade the State has also witnessed the rise of a number of people's resistance movements against displacement and environmental degradation...
More »