That accountability is vital in a democracy was reinforced at a National Convention of the National Campaign for the People's Right to Information held in Shillong recently… If governments do not investigate corruption, people should have the right and power to do so themselves. When the idea of a people's legal right to information took initial shape in the dusty villages of Rajasthan nearly two decades ago amidst people's struggles for...

Low on economic progress, high on progressiveness. That sums up Darntoli, a tribal hamlet in Torpa block of Khunti district which clocked one of the highest sex ratios, 994 females for every 1,000 males in the 2011 Census, the provisional figures of which were released yesterday. According to 2001 Census, the figure was 971 females. The latest figures are much higher than the state average of 947 and the national average of...

In fashionably liberal circles, Prashant Bhushan is an authentic modern hero, the people's advocate who uses the killer argument to avenge the aam admi on the bloodless battlefield of the Supreme Court. Among his lawyer peers, Bhushan is somewhat disdainfully seen as an "activist who takes up causes, not cases". Some politicians call him a "self-righteous" busybody with a penchant for the sensational storyline. Some others loathe the 55-year-old, who helped...

Jharkhand now boasts a healthy literacy figure of 67.63 per cent, up by almost 14 per cent since 2001. Thanks to the centrally-sponsored Sarva Siksha Abhiyan, almost all the 32,000 villages in the state now have schools compared to only 16,000 in 2000. Provisional census data released today suggests that literacy figures improved from 54 per cent in 2001 to nearly 68 per cent. Male literacy increased from 67 per cent in...

A section of the government suspects that “bigger forces” are using the fight against corruption to achieve their “not-so-noble goals” perhaps even unknown to Anna Hazare. Although nobody would go on record, senior functionaries said in private that the destabilising games of some corporate and even international players were behind “the entire show”. “The RSS and other anti-Congress elements might have jumped in with their own little vested interests but the real...