-The Economic Times The CBI manual contradicts the government's stance that it did no wrong in vetting the draft status report of the agency's probe in the coal allocation case, say legal experts, former CBI officials and activists. The manual says while CBI's superintendence is vested in the central government, its supervising authority is the Central Vigilance Commission in case of investigation of offences alleged to have been committed under the...

-Down to Earth For RTI activists of Bihar the cost of exposing corruption is life Twenty-year-old Rahul Kumar, a right to information (RTI) activist, knew the land mafia was behind his parents' murder. His mother and father were involved in a land dispute in Muzaffarpur's Sirisia Jagdish village. Barely a week after filing an RTI application to seek information about the murderers, Kumar was kidnapped. A day later, on March 10, 2012,...

-The Times of India Less than 24 hours before the Supreme Court takes up the coal scam hearing on Tuesday, a blame game broke out within the government over who was responsible for incorrectly telling the court that the CBI had not shared the contents of its status report on " Coalgate" with the political executive. In a four-page letter to attorney general Goolam Vahanvati, additional solicitor general Harin Raval said he...

-PTI Finance Ministry should appoint a nodal officer to distribute RTI applications to the concerned central Public Information Officer for processing, the Delhi High Court has directed while upholding the order of Central Information Commission in this regard. The Finance Ministry has five departments-- Economic Affairs, Revenue, Expenditure, Financial Services and Disinvestment. Each one of them have different sets of Central Public Information Officers for processing RTI applications but there is none to...

-The Hindustan Times A civil society group on Friday demanded key changes in the bill to protect whistleblowers, including widening its scope to bring all categories of public servants and private sector employees under its purview. The National Campaign for People's Right to Information, after day-long consultations with the families of some of the whistleblowers, asked the government to make the definition of victimisation clear in the bill. The Whistleblowers Protection Bill was...