Aruna Roy, a Magsaysay award winner former bureaucrat, was closely involved in the drafting of the Right to Information (RTI) Act. As a member of the UPA's National Advisory Council (NAC), among other things, she has been conveying to the government the views of civil society on the proposed changes in the transparency act. On the sidelines of 3rd national convention of National Campaign for People’s Right to Information, held...

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...

The quashing of the appointment of P.J. Thomas as the CVC shows the judiciary can go beyond the express provisions of law to render justice. THE Indian Constitution does not envisage strict separation of powers among the three branches of the government – the executive, the legislature and the judiciary. This flexibility permits marginal incursions though one branch cannot usurp the essential functions of the other. One of the essential functions...

Budget 2011-12 and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. THREE decades ago, in the early years of the Special Component Plan (SCP) for Scheduled Castes – very recently renamed inappropriately as Scheduled Castes Sub-Plan (SCSP) – Indira Gandhi on her return as Prime Minister wrote two historical D.O. letters dated March 12, 1980, one to Central Ministers and the other to State Chief Ministers, regarding the SCP in the Central...

This article explores the issue of dalits’ inclusion in the media industry. It argues that under-representation of dalits in Indian media leads to an exclusion of news on dalits. [This was presented in the “National Conference on Ethical Issues and Indian Media” held on 26 and 27 November 2010 and in Periyar University, Salem, Tamil Nadu.] [J Balasubramaniam (balumids@gmail.com) is with the Department of Journalism and Science Communication, Madurai Kamaraj University.] The basis...