After Politicians and judges of Supreme Court, now the assets of babus have been prised open to public scrutiny. In a landmark order, the Central Information Commission has said that disclosure of information such as assets of a public servant, routinely collected by the public authority, should be made available to the public under the Right to Information Act. Passing the order in a case involving an officer with the...

If your child can go from a ‘near zero’ learning ability to getting 95 per cent in mathematics and from a state of malnutrition to WHO-approved standards of health, chances are that you will not find the Naxal ideology all that attractive. I was in the Naxal heartland of Bastar to review the learning skills of children in 300 schools who were being educated by the Naandi Foundation when news...

Much like the tsunami waves that devastated many coastal areas five years ago, the closing weeks of 2009 saw an ill wind sweeping across many of our democratic institutions, highlighting that beneath the veneer of the nation’s aspirations towards great power status was a crumbling institutional core. To look at the fourth estate first. The preface to the Press Council of India’s “Norms of Journalistic Conduct” has a section that...

The finance ministry has quietly initiated the process of opening up the income tax files of Politicians belonging to all parties and tallying their income statements with the affidavits filed by them with the Election Commission during the 2009 parliamentary polls. Verification of the assets declared by the Lok Sabha candidates, many of whom have now become MPs and even ministers, will help the department to assess if they had...

Food prices have shot up by more than 20 per cent in the course of the past 12 months. A vast proportion of the nation is being battered by the price rise — the fixed income group, the working classes, landless peasantry and small farmers who have to buy at least a part of the grains they consume from the market. There is, however, no upheaval among the suffering people....