Eight days after Gandhian Anna Hazare called off his fast demanding a stronger Lokpal law, the joint committee to draft the bill met on Saturday for the first time amid a controversy over a CD allegedly involving eminent lawyer and panel co-chairman Shanti Bhushan. The meeting chaired by finance minister Pranab Mukherjee was held at North Block and attended by Ministers P Chidambaram, Kapil Sibal, M Veerappa Moily and Salman Khurshid...

Gandhi resorted to some 30 fasts, of which one-third were directed at himself, for ‘atonement’ or self-purification, one-third were directed against the raj and one-third at India’s social mores. A more honest trinity cannot be imagined. The latter two kinds of fasts were meant to make an impact on the ‘other side’; they were part-fasts and part- hunger strikes, part anashan and part bhukh-hartal, though he derived from each a sense...

A day after he ended his 97-hour fast demanding a stronger anti-graft Lokpal Bill, social activist Anna Hazare Sunday said the process of formulating the act will be videographed and the procedures will be made public. 'The committee will start its work on the draft from April 16, the procedures will be videographed and made public,' Hazare told reporters. 'The procedure will be totally transparent, from formulation to the time after it...

Going with its slogan: “Our money our right,” the Shillong declaration of the 3rd National Right to Information Convention today resolved that the Central Government must subject “all public expenditure under social audit.” It was by far one of the most crucial of the other 11 resolutions passed in the Shillong Declaration and was only included after the strong insistence of RTI activist, Aruna Roy. She was amply supported by some...

N.K. Singh, the Janata Dal (United) Rajya Sabha MP, “voluntarily” recused himself from participating in the proceedings of the parliamentary public accounts committee looking into the 2G spectrum allocations. His decision was made public today by PAC chairperson Murli Manohar Joshi after the panel questioned the editors of Outlook and Open magazines, which published the transcripts of the Radia tapes some months ago. Singh’s conversation with corporate lobbyist Niira Radia figured in...