-PTI   The Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI), an autonomous public private partnership project headed by the Prime Minister's cardiologist K Srinath Reddy, comes under the ambit of the RTI Act as it is substantial financed by the government, the CIC has held.  The PHFI came into existence in the year 2006 with an initial fund corpus of Rs 200 crore, in which government had contributed Rs 65 crore, the Central Information...

Indians with undisclosed foreign assets and offshore bank accounts will be in for a shock this Budget if the finance ministry clears a proposal empowering income tax authorities to reopen assessments up to 16 years as against 6 years now.  The proposed amendment, the ministry feels, may not only act as a deterrent, but also put pressure on people to declare their wealth stashed away in Swiss banks and tax havens.  In...

-Reuters   Global warming will get worse as agricultural methods accelerate the rate of soil erosion, which depletes the amount of carbon the soil is able to store, a United Nations' Environment Programme report said on Monday. Soil contains huge quantities of carbon in the form of organic matter. which provides nutrients for plant growth and improves soil fertility and water movement. The top metre of soil alone stores around 2,200 billion tonnes of...

-The Times of India   Petitions seeking the inclusion of Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and National Investigation Agency (NIA) under the Right to Information Act, have to be transferred to theSupreme Court to be heard along with other petitions raising similar demands, CBI told the high court on Wednesday.  When the case came up for hearing before actingChief Justice Manjula Chellur and Justice PR Ramachandra Menon, CBI's counsel submitted to the court...

The recommendations of the Planning Commission’s High Level Expert Group on Access to Universal Healthcare are significant because they make explicit the need to contextualise health within the rights. However, the problem with the report is that it does not ask why many of the same recommendations that were made by previous committees have not been implemented. The HLEG neither recognises the problems, constraints and compulsions at the national, state...