-TheWire.in The letter by the former Delhi chief justice highlights the dangers of decriminalising the Companies Act, introducing electoral bonds, weakening the RTI Act and not implementing of the Lokpal Act and Whistleblowers Protection Act. New Delhi: In a letter sent to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, former chief justice of Delhi high court and noted rights activist A.P. Shah has lamented that “instead of increasing transparency and accountability and making the deterrents...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Forced to defer introduction of the Right to Information (Amendment) Bill, 2018, in the face of stiff opposition in Parliament and outside, the Narendra Modi government appears to have brought it into effect without parliamentary approval through an advertisement. On July 26, the department of personnel, public grievances & pensions issued an advertisement for appointment of information commissioners in the Central Information Commission (CIC) that said the "salary,...

-Hindustan Times Election Commission of India (ECI) is outgunned when it comes to confronting those who circumvent existing campaign finance rules and lacks power to sanction candidates. It is a truism to note that political finance sits at the heart of corruption in modern India. While politicians publicly lament the status quo, they privately profit from the current system. Therefore, the fact that the Narendra Modi government has made reforming political finance...

-CaravanMagazine.in Nearly a year ago, the government of India constituted a committee of experts chaired by the former Supreme Court judge BN Srikrishna to draft a data-protection law for India. Almost immediately, the committee became mired in controversy—it was first criticised for the lack of civil-society representatives among its members, and subsequently for the opacity of its proceedings, and its inefficient public consultation on the data-protection framework. In recent months, the...

-Hindustan Times The issue of money in politics is a matter of pressing concern across the democratic world. Recent headlines, for instance, reveal that scandals linked with political finance irregularities dot the globe. In France, former president Nicolas Sarkozy is being investigated on allegations that his 2007 campaign received millions of dollars from late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. In Brazil, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was sentenced to a dozen years...