In a season when every self-styled warrior against corruption is trying to look for a new weapon to fight it, my guest today is Satyananda Mishra, Chief Information Commissioner—someone who has in his control the strongest of those weapons, the RTI. Actually when it all began, nobody thought it would be so effective. In a period of five-and-a-half years, it has touched the hearts and minds of people. The number of...

The Right to Education Act, which lacks a transformational vision, is geared to preparing foot soldiers for the global market. THE most encouraging and delightful news regarding school education in India since the pro-market reforms began in 1991 came from Erode district in Tamil Nadu recently. To be sure, it is neither about the World Bank-sponsored District Primary Education Programme (DPEP) of the 1990s nor about the internationally funded and...

The Joint Lokpal Bill Drafting Committee concludes its meetings without any agreement on major issues. ON June 21, as the five government representatives and the five civil society members of the Joint Lokpal Bill Drafting Committee ended their deliberations after exchanging their versions of the draft Lokpal Bill, the battle lines were clearly drawn. The government was in no mood to agree with the civil society members led by Anna...

Rather than shutting its doors on ‘civil society’, the government should be thanking its stars that the latter wants to make law, not war. Distributing tee-shirts with this slogan would be a better use of the government’s ‘hearts and minds’ funds than the integrated action plan to counter Naxals, or the army’s tourism trips to Pune for Kashmiri schoolgirls. The UPA regime has been unprecedented for the spate of legislation that...

-PTI   After a not so pleasant experience of engaging with Anna Hazare's team in drafting of the Lok Pal Bill, the government says that there will be no such experiment in the future. HRD Minister Kapil Sibal, one of the key members of the joint committee for drafting the Lok Pal Bill, also maintains that it cannot be cited as a precedent. He says the draft of the bill will undergo changes...