The RTI Act was envisaged as a potent weapon to fight corruption by ushering in an age of transparency. Yet powerful men in power have ganged up to throttle the law through deliberate delays and by arm-twisting applicants. A comprehensive look at the law. Aweapon in the hands of people. That was how the Right to Information (RTI) Act was envisaged, almost six years back. But the bureaucracy, in connivance with...

That accountability is vital in a democracy was reinforced at a National Convention of the National Campaign for the People's Right to Information held in Shillong recently… If governments do not investigate corruption, people should have the right and power to do so themselves. When the idea of a people's legal right to information took initial shape in the dusty villages of Rajasthan nearly two decades ago amidst people's struggles for...

Accord highest priority to inclusion of SCs and STs, says Council Ministry's methodology will result in some of the most vulnerable slipping through cracks: NAC Exclusion could prove politically disastrous to United Progressive Alliance The Sonia Gandhi-headed National Advisory Council celebrated on Thursday its first major success, in its second avatar, in blocking the government's efforts to dilute the landmark Right to Information Act. But, if that was the good news, the bad news...

Why are the erstwhile RTI campaigners so alarmed five years after it became law? Why so many dharnas, rallies, conventions and hunger-strikes all over again? Part of the reason is that the silent revolution that the RTI has spawned needs to be defended from surreptitious alterations and manipulations, and partly because the RTI activists are being threatened, harassed and assaulted by the corrupt and the powerful, often with the connivance...

Have right, will ask. That's the spirit of the growing number of information seekers in the state who are increasingly using the Right to Information (RTI) Act to know who's spending taxpayers' money — and how. Enacted in the summer of 2005, the RTI Act has seen a dramatic rise in its users with Karnataka registering a 10-fold increase in just four years. Latest figures by the Karnataka Information Commission, the...