Since she could remember, labourer Rama Nag (34) didn't know what her ration card meant, that as one of India's nearly 400 million officially poor people, she was entitled to subsidised foodgrain. Until 2006, here in the heart of impoverished tribal India, on the edge of the sprawling forests of Bastar and the Maoist zone of Dantewada, Nag and her family of four survived on rice and whatever they could...

Information Commissioner Shailesh Gandhi has pulled up the Delhi Government's Food and Supplies Department for a “distressing state of affairs where ration cards are not being printed for three years by a vendor''. Mr. Gandhi made the observation while disposing of an appeal by a resident of a slum cluster in Delhi who had filed a Right to Information application with the Department on not getting a ration card even three...

A law empowering Indians to seek information from government to promote accountability and transparency has brought change to urban India, but has largely left out the country's rural poor, social activists say. The Right to Information (RTI) Act - similar to the Freedom of Information Act in the United States - was enacted almost five years ago and is aimed at providing a practical way for all citizens to access...

A full bench of the Central Information Commission headed by Chief Central Information Commissioner Wajahat Habibullah has recently held that while all proceedings before the Parliamentary Committees (PC) are no doubt held secret, it cannot be stretched to mean that every single item of information, held anywhere, that may, now or in future, become part of the proceedings before the PC, or may be required to be produced before the...

A clutch of activists questioned the manner in which government went about choosing information commissioners,or the authorities tasked with facilitating public inquiry under the Right to Information (RTI) Act. In a press conference, prominent RTI activists, including Magsaysay awardee Arvind Kejriwal, alleged that Department of Personnel and Training hadn’t prescribed rules to select information commissioners. This, they added, encouraged an arbitary selection of individuals to these posts. India’s RTI Act of...