-TheWire.in Figures highlighted in an RTI reply cut to the heart of a debate over the government’s assertion to count Mudra loan beneficiaries as employed. New Delhi: Struggling to deliver on the poll promise to create one crore jobs a year, the Narendra Modi government and the BJP may have found a face-saver in the flagship self-employment Mudra scheme, launched under the Pradhan Mantri Mudra Yojana (PMMY) in 2015. However, three years in,...

-PTI Aruna Roy also feels that there is still a need to see the RTI as a larger democratic and people's constitutional tool to make power truthful and accountable and put pressure on the political establishment, which it cannot ignore or distort. New Delhi: There is a necessity for a whistleblowers act to protect RTI users as the system has “strategised to stall” free flow of information to disempower and stop such...

-The Hindu ‘Information Commissioners are not being appointed’ Hyderabad: Releasing her RTI Story Power to The People in the city, activist Aruna Roy, who led the movement for getting the legislation in place, said citizens were moving towards a more challenging and non-transparent environment. “This government has consolidated opaqueness. It has systematically weakened the RTI Act by granting exemptions to CBI and other agencies on security grounds. Electoral bonds are a case in...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Prakash Javadekar's human resource development ministry has failed to back up with details his four-month-old claim that Aadhaar-linkage had helped the government identify 80,000 "ghost lecturers'' at colleges and universities. Anjali Bhardwaj and Amrita Johri of the Satark Nagrik Sangathan had moved separate Right to Information applications on the subject. Bhardwaj had sought the state-wise break-up of the "ghost lecturers", their names and those of the colleges and universities...

-The Indian Express In 2013, the Supreme Court ordered the poll panel to introduce VVPATs in a phased manner, and the Commission has committed to have it in place by the time of the 2019 general elections. New Delhi: ARGUING that the involvement of private players could hurt the credibility of the electoral process, the Election Commission (EC) rejected the government’s proposal to buy voter-verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) units from private...