Wajahat Habibullah, India’s chief information commissioner, has a towering task. He sees to it that the government gives its citizens information they ask for under the 2005 Right to Information Act, a position that effectively makes him an umpire astride India’s mighty bureaucracy and messy democracy. He is retiring later this month after five years in office—that’s how long the RTI law, which allows citizens to demand official documents, has been...

KEY TRENDS   • Section 105 of the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in the Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013, which provides for excluding 13 Central legislation, including Land Acquisition (Mines) Act 1885, Atomic Energy Act, 1962, Railway Act 1989, National Highways Act 1956 and Metro Railways (Construction of Works) Act, 1978, from its purview, has been amended for payment of compensation with rigours $ • The amendments have now...

To make the domestic coconut industry globally competitive, the Coconut Development Board has decided to impart technological training to farmers, processors, traders and exporters. To facilitate this, Union Minister of State for Agriculture K.V. Thomas will lay the foundation stone for a ‘farmers block' at the board's headquarters in Kochi on Septem ber 2, which is being observed as the World Coconut Day. The venue would serve as a centre for...

The prime minister, in his Independence Day address said: “I am happy that the growth rate of our agriculture has increased substantially in the last few years. But we are still far from achieving our goal. We need to work harder so that we can increase the agricultural growth rate to 4% per annum” . Is it possible? If so how? The production shortage of wheat in India in 2006...

When former Karnataka Lokayukta N Santosh Hegde recently said that vested interests were controlling the mining industry, he was not exaggerating, considering that India registered over 182,000 cases of illegal mining across 17 states in the last five years alone. The Union government data show that Andhra Pradesh — the single largest contributor to the country’s mineral production of roughly Rs 1,28,000 crore — alone registered a 110 per cent increase...