-The Deccan Herald   The Central Information Commission has held that the Right to Information (RTI) Act cannot be used to get details of orders or judgments from the Supreme Court or the High Courts.  Significantly, the transparency panel clarified that since the Supreme Court as well as High Courts prescribed their own set of rules for providing judicial records, the information seekers could not use the RTI Act for that purpose. “We have...

The Madhya Pradesh Chief Information Commissioner has ruled that the elite Arera Club of Bhopal, associated chiefly with bureacucrats and the city's wealthy, shall be under the purview of the Right to Information Act. Chief Information Commissioner Padmapani Tiwari in an order passed on Thursday, rejected the club officials' contention that the club was a private body and did not fall under the purview of the RTI act. The CIC order came...

 The Central Information Commission has ordered the Command Hospital to allow RTI applicant Kannan Nambiar to inspect certain records for as many as six hours. Chief Election Commissioner M L Sharma, who issued the directive last week, rejected the contentions of the Command Hospital for denying information to Nambiar under the Right to Information (RTI) Act. Nambiar, a medical vendor, had shot in to limelight in December 2010 when on his...

The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance finds the UID project to be “conceptualised with no clarity” and “directionless”. THE Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance has dealt a body blow to the Unique Identification (UID) project. The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) was set up under the Planning Commission by an executive order on January 28, 2009. The scheme involves the collection of demographic and biometric information to issue ID numbers to...

Here's an encounter that the city police are in no mood to encourage. Within days of a Right to Information activist subjected to third degree at a city police station, TOI finds that it wasn't a stray bad experience, with cops pulling out all stops to stay RTI-proof. In fact, police officers in some stations even say they are unaware of the RTI Act and remain most unresponsive when it...