Accord highest priority to inclusion of SCs and STs, says Council Ministry's methodology will result in some of the most vulnerable slipping through cracks: NAC Exclusion could prove politically disastrous to United Progressive Alliance The Sonia Gandhi-headed National Advisory Council celebrated on Thursday its first major success, in its second avatar, in blocking the government's efforts to dilute the landmark Right to Information Act. But, if that was the good news, the bad news...

Why are the erstwhile rti campaigners so alarmed five years after it became law? Why so many dharnas, rallies, conventions and hunger-strikes all over again? Part of the reason is that the silent revolution that the rti has spawned needs to be defended from surreptitious alterations and manipulations, and partly because the rti activists are being threatened, harassed and assaulted by the corrupt and the powerful, often with the connivance...

Have right, will ask. That's the spirit of the growing number of information seekers in the state who are increasingly using the Right to Information (rti) Act to know who's spending taxpayers' money — and how. Enacted in the summer of 2005, the rti Act has seen a dramatic rise in its users with Karnataka registering a 10-fold increase in just four years. Latest figures by the Karnataka Information Commission, the...

A rising number of cases of blackmail of government officers by using the Right to Information (rti) Act, 2005, are being reported in rti circles. Some of these cases came out in the open during the hearing of second appeals by the state information commissioner (SIC) Pune, Vijay Kuvelekar, recently. After a particularly gruelling hearing, a gram sevak from Satara broke down before the SIC and revealed that in her village...

Information on allegations of corruption is not excluded from disclosure under the Right to Information Act, the Central Information Commission (CIC) has held. The information could be furnished by applying the severability clause under Section 10, Information Commissioner Sushma Singh said in an order passed on an appeal filed by Vishwanath Swami, a social activist of Chennai. Seeking information on every purchase made by the Narcotic Control Bureau for office modernisation...