Surprise was in store for Sushil Kaushik when in 1989 he first joined duty as a constable in Serkot in Uttar Pradesh’s Bijnor district. He had no idea how corrupt police officials can be. He saw policemen taking bribes, and superiors deducting constables’ salaries without giving any explanation. Kaushik questioned his bosses on the irregularities he came across. In Serkot his colleagues would take bribes from villagers who brought fire-wood...

While the landmark Right to Education Act takes the promise of primary education to more than eight million children, there are still many lacunae on the ground. But, as the Shiksha Adhikar Yatra, conducted by Dalit organisations in UP and Rajasthan showed, citizens now have the tools to demand and receive effective governance.  The landmark right to information act has made a huge impact at the local level on the...

Can more knowledge about our society, about the individuals and groups who constitute it, be a bad thing? I’ve been wondering about this lately, in the context of two government initiatives to gather more knowledge about us Indians, as caste groups and as individuals. Both of these information-gathering exercises—the proposal for a “caste census”, which has generated a stormy argument, and the merely desultory discussion over the planned Unique Identification...

The Supreme Court on May 7 ruled that natural resources were national assets that belonged to the people and were ideally exploited by public sector undertakings. This obviously implies that local communities, including tribals, living on mineralised land, enjoy entitlements but not prescriptive ownership rights to such national assets. This is an important reiterative clarification defining mineral rights in Fifth Schedule areas that are currently in contention. Whether PSUs should...

Climate activists in India have discovered a crucial tool in their battle to hold the government accountable on its climate policies: the country's landmark Right to Information (RTI) Act. Passed in 2005, the act requires all government bodies to respond to citizen requests for information within 30 days. Many bodies, threatened with legal action after initially failing to respond, are now delivering information that shows big gaps in the country's...