-The Telegraph New Delhi: The bureaucracy - both serving and retired - may be divided over the Modi government's bid to institutionalise lateral entry, but there is consensus that the UPSC should conduct the recruitment for the 10 joint secretary posts that have been opened up to people outside the system. The failure of the department of personnel and training to mention who would be conducting the recruitment for lateral entry in...

-The Hindu The social activist whose new book on the RTI is just out, worries about the doublespeak in politics today, where rhetoric and substance never match The past couple of months have been hectic for Aruna Roy. The social activist and Magsaysay Award winner has been travelling across the country to promote her book, The RTI Story: Power to the People, which came out in April. After waiting more than a...

The country’s agrarian sector in the last financial year expanded at almost half the rate at which it grew in 2016-17, shows the recently released provisional estimates by the Central Statistics Office (CSO). As compared to a growth rate of 6.3 percent witnessed in 2016-17, the growth rate in real Gross Value Added (GVA) by the agrarian sector (i.e., increase in agricultural GVA after neutralizing the effect of price inflation)...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The National Campaign for Peoples' Right to Information on Friday urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to put the proposed amendments to the RTI Act in the public domain in keeping with the government's policy of pre-legislative consultations. The policy, adopted in 2014, mandates that all draft legislation (including subordinate legislation) should be placed in the public domain for 30 days and comments invited from the public. It also requires...

-Civil Society News New Delhi: In 1974, Dr Samir Chaudhuri, a paediatrician working in Kolkata’s slums, founded Child in Need Institute (CINI) to tackle the many dimensions of child malnutrition. It struck him at the time that malnutrition wasn’t just a clinical problem but a complex phenomenon rooted in gender issues. Over the years, led by Dr Chaudhuri, CINI developed deep understanding of the social, economic and political underpinnings of malnutrition...