What pleases Sunita Devi most about her position in Garhi Hakeeqat is not the Women’s Reservation Bill promising mandatory reservation for women in the electoral process that will promote many like her, but the proud remembrance of the day she climbed up the village chaupal. Until three years ago, the rules were stiff. The chaupal, a raised, circular platform-like structure for public meetings was, for all practical purposes, considered a preserve...

Central Information Commissioner Shailesh Gandhi recently took the extraordinary step of unilaterally releasing the minutes of the October 14, 2009 meeting between Union Minister Prithviraj Chavan and Central and State Information Commissioners on a proposal to significantly amend the Right to Information Act, 2005. The meeting's importance lay in the fact that it saw the hopeless isolation of the government side (Department of Personnel and Training, Ministry of Personnel, Public...

In his recent Budget speech, the finance minister reiterated the government’s plans to make India “slum-free” within five years. This mantra is now being chanted in many urban-related conferences. However, this raises a number of questions. What does a “slum-free” India really mean? Is the removal of slums really desirable? Most importantly, what needs to be done to improve the lives of the millions of urban poor? In this article,...

Encouraging women's participation in politics, the historic bill to reserve 33 percent of seats for them in parliament and the legislatures will impact the country's political scenario, the patriarchal system and the caste struggle in rural India, experts say. Bibhu Mahapatra, consultant of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) project on Legal Empowerment, said: 'The 73rd constitutional amendment, passed in 1992, gave constitutional recognition to local self governance and reserved 33...

Indian judiciary would take 320 years to clear the backlog of 31.28 million cases pending in various courts including High courts in the country, Andhra Pradesh High Court judge Justice V V Rao said. "If one considers the total pendency of cases in the Indian judicial system, every judge in the country will have an average load of about 2,147 cases," Justice Rao said, while delivering the keynote address on...