Contents of a four-page letter from Chief Justice of India K G Balakrishnan to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh shows the country’s top judge recommending the inclusion of a specific clause in the Right to Information Act, 2005 to exempt judiciary from the transparency law’s ambit. The CJI in his letter dated September 16, 2009 pointed out how the “framers of the RTI Act” failed to visualise the extent to which...

A PIL in the Supreme Court on Monday made a strong pitch for utilising the elaborate ‘Census 2011’ mechanism to end the 80 long years of speculation about the exact population of other backward classes (OBC), which had been the basis for 27% reservation in jobs and educational institutions. PIL petitioner Kishore Govind Kanhere through counsel D K Garg said that while the Mandal Commission estimated that OBCs constituted 52%...

Last summer, about 150 families of Kachan village in Jharkhand’s Palamu district decided to pool funds to repair their only community tube well. A drought, the worst in many years, had dried up two ponds; there were no wells around; and the tube well had been dysfunctional for a year. It took a lot of hardship and one whole month for them to put together what the mechanic had asked...

A week after the suicide of a BMC engineer, his family alleges he was murdered for being a whistle blower. They refuse to cremate his body unless a CBI probe is ordered. On March 27, the convicts were sentenced by a Patna court for murdering Satyendra Dubey, an engineer who had exposed corruption in the National Highway Authority of India. On the very same day, in Mumbai, a 28-year-old engineer,...

The Supreme Court on Wednesday ordered an inquiry by the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) into trafficking of children from Manipur and Assam to Tamil Nadu on the pretext of providing them better education. “We would like to have an inquiry into the matter,” a Bench comprising Chief Justice K.G. Balakrishnan and Justices Deepak Verma and B.S. Chauhan said, while asking the Commission to place its report within...