While Jammu and Kashmir government makes tall claims about the implementation of Right to Information (RTI) Act, on the contrary its departments are not furnishing the mandatory information to the State Information Commission (SIC), thereby affecting Monitoring and reporting of the law. Informed sources told Greater Kashmir that majority of the administrative and field departments of the state are defaulters vis-a-vis submission of the quarterly and annual information to SIC on...

-The Economic Times   A government-appointed committee has recommended a complete overhaul of government accounting norms with a view to enforcing transparency and better Monitoring of public spending.  In its report submitted to finance minister Pranab Mukherjee, the C R Sundaramurti Committee has suggested rationalisation and reorganisation of the existing account classification of list of major and minor heads of accounts (LMMHA) of centre and states."  The proposed accounting classification structure will provide a...

-The Hindu   At a time when Karnataka is in the news for increase in the number of malnourished children, the Jana Arogya Andolana Karnataka (JAAK), an NGO working in the field of health, has come out with a portal on hunger The portal, www.republicofhunger.org, is aimed at conveying to people the depth of the problem and will serve as a watchdog, and examine the claims of the State Government regarding the issue...

Questionable drug trials on mentally challenged persons by doctors in Indore emphasise the need for strict enforcement of medical ethics. IN what appears to be a page out of Robin Cook's medical thriller, government and private doctors in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, reportedly carried out clinical trials of various medicines on some 233 patients who had gone to them seeking psychiatric treatment. As in Cook's famous book Coma, in which a medical...

-CNN-IBN   Contrary to the dominant narrative that areas where Naxalites are strong are where the state has been absent, for the last 100-150 years, there has been a gradual expansion of the state in tribal areas regardless of whether the people want it or not. However, the state has been expanding in the wrong areas. You have an extension of the forest department, the bureaucracy, the patwari and the forest guard....