ON August 3, the Chief Information Commissioner, Satyananda Mishra, delivered two important decisions directing the Central Public Information Officer (CPIO) of the Supreme Court to answer certain questions about the functioning of the court to information-seekers in the manner they have sought it. In the first case, Commodore Lokesh K. Batra (Retd) vs CPIO, Supreme Court of India, the appellant had sought details about those cases pending in the Supreme Court...

-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...

Bringing an aggressive outlook to the ministry of rural development, Jairam Ramesh, who took charge of the portfolio in July, has attempted to address and fast-track contentious issues such as the proposed land acquisition legislation and the census for identifying households below the poverty line (BPL). Ramesh spoke in an interview about his blueprint for the ministry and revisiting controversial elements, including identifying the poor and poverty caps imposed by...

-The Business Standard   Much depends on a strong implementation framework but the imposition of a cap by the Planning Commission could lead to arbitrary exclusions. Himanshu Assistant Professor of Economics, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University The methodology, which is based on the framework suggested by the Saxena Committee, uses indicators that have been refined using a large-scale pilot survey There are over 400 million poor (the number varies depending on which estimate you...