Several officials across central ministries have been spending unusually long periods in the same department, thanks to political and bureaucratic patronage. Some of them have taken bizarre proportions, with at least two section officers in the ministry of corporate affairs being there since 1977, for almost 34 years. According to last available communications, the ministry top brass was still trying to ensure that both of them remained there. Details also show that...

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...

A rising number of cases of blackmail of government officers by using the Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005, are being reported in RTI circles. Some of these cases came out in the open during the hearing of second appeals by the state information commissioner (SIC) Pune, Vijay Kuvelekar, recently. After a particularly gruelling hearing, a gram sevak from Satara broke down before the SIC and revealed that in her village...

Information on allegations of corruption is not excluded from disclosure under the Right to Information Act, the Central Information Commission (CIC) has held. The information could be furnished by applying the severability clause under Section 10, Information Commissioner Sushma Singh said in an order passed on an appeal filed by Vishwanath Swami, a social activist of Chennai. Seeking information on every purchase made by the Narcotic Control Bureau for office modernisation...

The CBI should be taken out of the purview of the Right to Information Act (RTI) to block information requests that could put lives of investigators at risk, solicitor general, Gopal Subramanium has advised the government. Subramanium has recommended that the CBI be exempted in light of the "complex and dangerous situations in which the Central Bureau of Investigation has to work". "Its officers need to be protected from dangers which...