-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Eminent citizens including former Delhi high court chief justice A P Shah, former cabinet secretary TRS Subramanian and former information commissioner Shailesh Gandhi have urged parliamentarians not to sign amendments to the RTI act when it is tabled. The government plans to bring amendments to the act to exclude political parties. The letter says that the RTI act has been used to uncover "certain arbitrariness and...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The Centre intends to exempt political parties from RTI scrutiny on the ground that they are not "substantially funded" by the government and so are not required to reveal details such donors and other funding sources. The government expects to consult political parties to firm up a consensus on undoing the Central Information Commission order putting parties under the ambit of the Right to Information Act...

-The Hindu Court rulings on freebies, elections and caste-based rallies, and the CIC order on political parties are a beginning towards cleansing politics but whether they can achieve the desired result is debatable The slew of judgments from the higher judiciary in the period of just about a month or so has been like manna from heaven on the parched earth of electoral reforms. First, the Supreme Court frowned upon freebies, which...

-The Hindu Growing number believe that the BJP is better at handling corruption Two out of three people feel that the UPA-2 is corrupt and that corruption has increased over the last four years, while a growing number believe that the BJP is better at handling corruption than the UPA, according to the CSDS poll. Even though corruption is only the fifth most important issue for voters in the 2014 elections, according to...

-The Hindu Kochi: An artificial scarcity of drugs looms large with the new drug pricing regime, slashing prices for 348 essential drugs, set to prevail from July 29. Many retailers who stock medicines for a week are not picking up medicines and are keeping a minimum inventory. Some retailers said distributors were not making medicines available. It has sent medical retail stores into a tizzy about the fate of already available stocks. J.S....