SOMETIMES, TO accentuate the intransigence of the present, one must revisit the past. So first, a flashback. The year is 2006. An ordinary November evening in Delhi. A slow, halting voice breaks into your consciousness. “How shall I explain? It is not a punishment, but my bounden duty…” A haunting phrase in a haunting voice, made slow with pain yet magnetic in its moral force. “My bounden duty.” What could...

Huge investments, the emergence of media conglomerates and their explosive growth have brought into focus new considerations that guide professional media decisions, Vice-President and Rajya Sabha Chairman M. Hamid Ansari said here on Wednesday. “Today, the demands of professional journalists are carefully balanced with the interests of owners and stakeholders of media companies and their cross media interests. The interplay of these conflicting demands is evident and [a] subject of...

Vice President Hamid Ansari Tuesday expressed concern over unavailability of information on the Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005, or the act itself in 22 official languages of India and said this needs to be addressed at the earliest. Ansari was speaking at the second and the concluding day of the 4th annual RTI convention oragnised by the Central Information Commission (CIC) here. The two-day convention is organized by the Central...

  KEY TRENDS    • A total of 7.55 lakh (755,247) RTI applications were received by the reporting public authorities in 2014-15. This is about 79,000 fewer RTI applications received in 2013-14. The CIC report notes this decline in the number of RTIs received. However almost 90,000 RTI applications were pending decision at the start of the reporting year of 2014-15 *@ • Around 67 percent of men and 54 percent of women interviewed...

KEY TRENDS  • The new Cohort-based Migration Metric (CMM) shows that inter-state labor mobility averaged 5-6.5 million people between 2001 and 2011, yielding an inter-state migrant population of about 60 million and an inter-district migration as high as 80 million @* • The first-ever estimates of internal work-related migration using railways data for the period 2011-2016 indicate an annual average flow of close to 9 million migrant people between the states. Both these estimates are significantly greater than the...