After his successful campaign for the Jan Lokpal Bill, Anna Hazare is now targeting electoral reform to curb corruption. While politicians were his main target, few realised that it was the bureaucrats who had enabled the politicians to abuse the system. The war on corruption needs drastic administrative reforms to curb the enormous power of the petty babus. The good intentions of prime ministers, the commitment of good officers and...

-The Hindustan Times   The home ministry has raised concerns that a fresh proposal of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) to independently collect biometric details could lead to duplication of effort and lead to wastage of public funds. The Cabinet had earlier mandated the census commissioner to create the national population register (NPR), a biometrics-based identity system. This required the census commissioner to create a data-base of all residents through door-to-door...

India should facilitate private sector growth in higher education, particularly in technical subjects, and should explore and develop innovative public-private partnerships (PPP) in the 12th Five-year Plan In a potential game-changer for India’s education sector, the Planning Commission has suggested that the country allow establishing institutes of higher learning that could be run for profit. “The not-for-profit tag in higher education sector should perhaps be re-examined in a more pragmatic manner so...

-The Telegraph   A myth is being sold to the people of West Bengal by those who claim that the state will “move ahead of several” others if it is renamed, data available in the public domain and collated by The Telegraph have established. The statistics show that meetings that decide resource allocation by the Centre are not decided on the basis of an inflexible alphabetical order. Each state’s preparedness to make presentations...

-The Deccan Chronicle   Shashidhar Mishra could have spent his entire life as a street vendor in his native village at Begusarai, Bihar. But he decided to get the information kept in the government files unlocked by filing more than 1,000 RTI applications. The reward he got was death. He was killed in his native village by unidentified gunmen in February 2010. Mishra is among at least 16 RTI activists who have...