RTI activists are angry with the state government for having appointed three commissioners to the Tamil Nadu Information Commission just before the model code of conduct came into force, with zero transparency. The government announced the appointments on Tuesday, hours before the election commission announced the poll date. Already, the appointment of former chief secretary KS Sripathi as the chief information commissioner is in a legal tangle after RTI activists...

Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus has been removed as the managing director of Grameen Bank, the organisation he founded in Bangladesh in 1983 to help the poor. The central bank has cited a rule that requires retirement at 60 to order the ouster of the 70-year-old “banker to the poor” who has been embroiled in a Norwegian funds scandal. Yunus had also fallen out with the political establishment after, fresh from the Nobel...

Bangladeshi Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus has launched a legal battle, one day after he was sacked from the Grameen microfinance bank he founded. Prof Yunus lodged a case in Bangladesh's High Court challenging his dismissal from the post, lawyers said. The central bank sacked him saying he was past retirement age and had been improperly installed in his post. Grameen Bank disputes the accusations. He has been under pressure from the government to...

No ads on government achievements at the cost of exchequer The Election Commission (EC) has asked the Chief Electoral Officers of Tamil Nadu, Assam, Kerala, West Bengal and Puducherry, where Assembly elections have been announced, to direct the district election officers (DEOs) to immediately constitute district-level committees to monitor and investigate paid news. The committees should scrutinise all newspapers to locate political advertisements in the garb of news coverage appearing during the...

Bant Singh, a scarred survivor of class violence in rural India, has an indisputable claim to be a voice for India's impoverished and muted millions. The folk singer lost both arms and a leg in an attack five years ago after he dared to challenge high-caste landlords in his area of the northwestern state of Punjab who had raped his 17-year-old daughter. Set upon by a gang armed with iron bars, he...