Why are the erstwhile RTI campaigners so alarmed five years after it became law? Why so many dharnas, rallies, conventions and hunger-strikes all over again? Part of the reason is that the silent revolution that the RTI has spawned needs to be defended from surreptitious alterations and manipulations, and partly because the RTI activists are being threatened, harassed and assaulted by the corrupt and the powerful, often with the connivance...

A rising number of cases of blackmail of government officers by using the Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005, are being reported in RTI circles. Some of these cases came out in the open during the hearing of Second Appeals by the state information commissioner (SIC) Pune, Vijay Kuvelekar, recently. After a particularly gruelling hearing, a gram sevak from Satara broke down before the SIC and revealed that in her village...

The CBI should be taken out of the purview of the Right to Information Act (RTI) to block information requests that could put lives of investigators at risk, solicitor general, Gopal Subramanium has advised the government. Subramanium has recommended that the CBI be exempted in light of the "complex and dangerous situations in which the Central Bureau of Investigation has to work". "Its officers need to be protected from dangers which...

Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar recently alleged that Monsanto, the Union environment ministry’s genetic engineering approval committee (GEAC) and the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) had colluded to start trials of genetically modified maize in Bihar before clearance from the environment ministry and the state government. The charge is significant: Nitish says ICAR’s experimental farms in Bihar did not maintain the stipulated “isolation distance” from normal farmland, meant to...

The Supreme Court will hear in open court on February 28 the curative petition filed by the Union government seeking enhancement of compensation of $470 million for Bhopal gas victims. The petition said the compensation, determined by the Supreme Court in 1989, was arrived at on the basis of assumptions of truth unrelated to realities. A five-judge Bench comprising Chief Justice S.H. Kapadia and Justices Altamas Kabir, R.V. Raveendran, B. Sudershan...