-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) wants the Narendra Modi government to give it Right to Information (RTI) powers as it has been facing problems in obtaining details relevant to its audits of government finances and decision making. CAG Shashi Kant Sharma has written a letter to finance minister Arun Jaitley demanding that the national auditor should be given RTI powers to access information and a...

-Economic and Political Weekly   The emphasis on use of digital technologies to bridge the "rural-urban gap" in the union budget is limited to high talk and minimal allocations. The need for a more comprehensive and peoples' participation-oriented rural action plan should have been the focus while setting sectoral allocations, but that is not to be in this mid-year budget. Vipul Mudgal (vipulmudgal@gmail.com) heads the Inclusive Media for Change project at the Centre...

-The Tribune The UPA's flagship programme MGNREGS changed the employment scene for the rural poor. While 100-day job guarantee was a novel step, loopholes and poor implementation rendered it a liability. The Modi govt hopes to gradually reinvent the scheme, if not entirely scrap it. Midway through the Congress-led UPA's second tenure - believed to be largely the courtesy of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) -...

-The Hindu It was late afternoon on December 21, 2012, five days after five men and a juvenile gang-raped and fatally assaulted a 23-year-old paramedic student in a moving bus in Delhi. The stream of people walking towards Raisina Hill kept growing. Every few minutes, a loud sound followed by smoke billowing from tear gas shells fired from the towering red sandstone government buildings would send the protesters running. In a...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Two super-speciality hospitals in the capital have not admitted any patient but auditors point out that both have already spent crores in maintenance. In 2011-12, Rajiv Gandhi Super-Speciality (RGSS) hospital had spent Rs 4.83 crore out of a budget allocation of Rs 5 crore. The following year, the allocation was increased to Rs 6 crore even though the expenditure on medical treatment remained the same -...