-The Telegraph New Delhi: Accused of diluting the RTI Act and weakening the architecture of accountability, the Narendra Modi government has gone into overdrive to dispute the allegation that comes at a time it is already under attack for injecting further opacity into political funding. Some erroneous media reports on the proposed RTI Rules, 2017 - circulated by the department of personnel and training (DoPT) on March 31 and open for consultations...

Promises are made to be broken. In its 2014 Lok Sabha election manifesto, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) made the promise that if it is elected to the Centre, it will then accord a high priority to job creation and opportunities for entrepreneurship, among other things. But latest data on unemployment shared by the BJP MP Shri Bandaru Dattatreya in written form while replying to an unstarred question in the...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: A clutch of legal amendments the Narendra Modi government has introduced to allow corporate political donors to mask their contributions drags the world's largest democracy against global currents of rising transparency in electoral funding, analysts and activists have warned. From Brazil to Bangladesh, and Croatia to Cyprus, countries of diverse sizes and varied histories with democracy have over the past decade adopted laws and rules aimed at making...

-The Hindu Business Line Aadhaar does more damage than good in welfare programmes It is widely believed that Aadhaar-Based Biometric Authentication (ABBA) is necessary to improve the delivery of welfare programmes such as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA), Public Distribution System (PDS), social security pensions, and so on. This is a misconception. We have been studying these programmes for a decade, focusing mainly on the source of leakages and...

-Firstpost.com Putting state governments that promised loan waivers for farmers in difficulty, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Thursday ruled out such waivers by the Centre insisting states can utilise their own resources in this regard. He clarified that the Centre will not adopt a selective approach by helping one state and not the others. The move is likely to put even BJP governments, including Devendra Fadnavis administration in Maharashtra and the newly...