With the Delhi high court ruling that the office of the Chief Justice of India comes within the ambit of the Right to Information Act, a long-drawn-out debate will now hopefully find amicable resolution. The ruling of the three-judge bench was on an appeal by the Supreme Court registry against the high court’s single-judge verdict in September. The challenge to the September verdict was that such liberal interpretation of the...

In a landmark verdict against the Supreme Court, the Delhi High Court on Tuesday held that the office of the Chief Justice of India comes within the ambit of the Right to Information law, saying judicial independence is not a judge's privilege but a responsibility cast upon him. The 88-page judgment is being seen as a personal setback to CJI K G Balakrishnan, who has been opposed to disclosure of...

A committee appointed by the Union Government has found fault with the entire process of land reforms, particularly the dubious role of officialdom, and called for revisiting the land ceiling limits and that too with retrospective effect. The Committee on State Agrarian Relations and the Unfinished Task in Land Reforms, set up subsequent to the Constitution of the National Council for Land Reforms under the Prime Minister, has underlined the relevance...

After seeking reply from Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Gas Transportation Infrastructure Ltd (RGTIL) and others on Monday, the Supreme Court on Thursday again issued notice to the firm, the ministry of petroleum and others on another batch of petitions filed by land owners from Surat seeking adequate compensation from the company for using their land for laying gas pipelines to transport natural gas from Krishna-Godavari basin to Gujarat. A Bench headed by...

Much like the tsunami waves that devastated many coastal areas five years ago, the closing weeks of 2009 saw an ill wind sweeping across many of our democratic institutions, highlighting that beneath the veneer of the nation’s aspirations towards great power status was a crumbling institutional core. To look at the fourth estate first. The preface to the Press Council of India’s “Norms of Journalistic Conduct” has a section that...