Under attack from political parties over funding of Anna Hazare's campaign for the Lokpal Bill, India Against Corruption, the umbrella organisation that steered the crusade, has released details of expenditure and said all civil society members of the joint drafting committee will declare their assets and liabilities on Friday. Two days before the first meeting of the joint drafting committee, India Against Corruption issued a detailed press statement on the expense...

Revelations by the WikiLeaks are having a positive impact, believes its founder Julian Assange, who claims that the publication of secret US embassy cables by the Indian media had helped inspire an anti-graft movement in the country. Questioned at a public debate about the whistleblowing organisation's own transparency, Assange told an audience of 700 people, many of them supporters: "We are directly supported on a week-to-week basis by you. You vote...

The editorial, Not a wealth of information (Our Take, March 19), was a correct description of what WikiLeaks has revealed about how India's foreign affairs and political establishments work. However, one sentence needs to be commented on, and that is its recommendation for setting up "a commission to look into the idea of public funding of political campaigns". This reveals how short our public memory is. Three learned groups have laboured...

Without additional funding in the battle against tuberculosis for research, improved prevention, early diagnosis and treatment, some 8 million people will die from what is largely a curable disease between now and 2015, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned today. “There is cause for optimism,” he said in a message marking World Tuberculosis Day. “The recent adoption of a fast and powerful new diagnostic tool promises to accelerate international gains against the disease. “At...

Technically, we know how to check the black economy but the problem is political. More studies or committees and treaties with foreign governments are only to stall action. Another Joint Parliamentary Committee has been announced. The government has been trying to create an impression of being proactive with regard to tackling the black economy. The President's address and the speech by Sonia Gandhi in January mentioned the need to curb it....