-The Indian Express Marking their first step outside Chhattisgarh, three Class IX boys of Kottaguda village visited Visakhapatnam on an education tour in January. Among the few selected by their school, they were the first students from the south of river Palteru to make the journey. They were awed by the mighty sea and ships in the coastal Andhra town. Two of them instantly dreamt of becoming mariners. The two, Kaka...

-Live Mint Shailesh Gandhi, a key campaigner for the Right to Information (RTI) Act, became an information commissioner at the Central Information Commission (CIC) in 2008. After a stint of nearly four years, Gandhi will retire on 6 July. In an interview, Gandhi talked about the implementation of the Act and on the government’s attitude to the transparency law. He said RTI had become a “problem child” for the government and it...

Ramesh Singh, an Intelligence Bureau officer and resident of Sonepur under Chhapra, has an MNREGA job card bearing registration number 914. Singh had never applied for it, nor did he know about its issuance Uday Kumar Dwivedi, employed in the Indian Navy, is a resident of Jaitiya village under Jahangirpur panchayat of Sonepur, Chhapra. He was also issued a job card (311). He, too, does not know about it and had...

-The Telegraph In government report cards on babus, “adequate” will now mean “inadequate” and “satisfactory” signify “unsatisfactory”. No, India’s government isn’t turning into a doublespeak-driven Orwellian Big Brother; nor is it taking lessons in obfuscation from Sir Humphrey Appleby of Yes Minister fame. What it has done, for the first time, is to define “non-performance” on the part of senior bureaucrats, nudging states to prematurely retire those whose annual reports routinely judge their...

Ranchi: Supreme Court today dismissed a petition filed by local tribals against setting up three national institutes of higher learning on the outskirts of Ranchi, arming a hitherto defensive district Administration to deal with the ongoing protests firmly. According to lawyer Rajeev Gupta, representing petitioners Mangu Oraon and others, an apex court division bench comprising Justice H.L. Gokhale and Justice Ranjana Desai observed that “it’s a 50-year old case” which the...