The Bill to protect whistleblowers, introduced in the Lok Sabha, is a belated but welcome move to shield those who stand up, often at great personal risk, for the sake of truth and the public interest. The Public Interest Disclosures and the Protection to Persons Making the Disclosures Bill 2010 is the circuitous and protracted outcome of the Supreme Court's strong pitch for a mechanism to protect whistleblowers. This it...

Citizens group urges Manmohan to pass Lokpal Bill CVC just an advisory body; it has no power to ask CBI to initiate inquiries Situation worse at State-level; Lokayuktas have to seek government permission A group of concerned citizens, including Karnataka Lokayukta Santosh Hegde, the former Chief Election Commissioner, J.M. Lyngdoh, and the former Central Vigilance Commissioner, P. Shankar, has written to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, urging him to take measures to pass a...

The Supreme Court on Tuesday asked the Union government to inform it of the steps taken to preserve the remaining grain procured. Hearing a petition filed by the People's Union for Civil Liberties relating to the streamlining of the PDS, a Bench of Justices Dalveer Bhandari and Deepak Verma, quoting the court commissioner's report, said 50,000 tonnes of wheat had deteriorated, and was not fit for consumption, and several lakhs of...

The Italian-born English poet Humbert Wolfe described the press of his day in the following terms: ''You cannot hope to bribe or twist, Thank God! The British journalist. But seeing what the man will do Unbribed, there’s no occasion to.'' Things have only got worse in this matter in the eighty-odd years since these words were written, and they have probably got worse in many more places. And so the age-old dilemma between freedom of...

The Supreme Court today told the Centre’s counsel to tell “your minister” it had issued “an order, not a suggestion”, to distribute free foodgrain to the poor. The stinging rebuke drew a measured response that masked the misgivings within the government and amplified the paranoia among parties that any debate could saddle them with the politically suicidal label “anti-poor”. The court was responding to comments attributed to food minister Sharad Pawar that...