-PTI NEW DELHI: Congress president Sonia Gandhi on Tuesday rolled out the ambitious and "game-changer" food security scheme in Delhi, Haryana and Uttarakhand after party leaders attacked Narendra Modi and the opposition for the delay in passage of the bill in Parliament. Unveiling the scheme by handing over food grain packets and Aadhar-based smart cards to 12 women beneficiaries in the capital, she lauded the UPA government for bringing "revolutionary changes" in...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: With the Right to Information (RTI) act slated for consideration in the Parliament this week concerned activists including Aruna Roy met PM Manmohan Singh to press for the deeper examination of the bill. The activists under the aegis of the National Campaign for People's Right to Information (NCPRI) including Anjali Bharadwaj and Nikhil Dey also submitted one lakh signatures to a petition seeking deferring the amendments. The...

-The Hindu Political parties have acted as judge, jury, supplicant and advocate in their move to amend the RTI Act and remove themselves from its purview. Their rhetoric on transparency sounds more hollow now than ever. The RTI Act provides a regime of consummate transparency of "public authorities". Instead of specifying information to be disclosed, the Act mandates 100 per cent transparency subject only to a tightly defined list of exclusions under...

-The Hindu While the UPA is showcasing cash transfers as a key initiative and has even made a provision for it in the National Food Security Bill (NFSB), there is a strong resistance to it. Major Opposition parties are moving amendments against cash transfers, food coupons and cash allowances in lieu of food even as the law is to come up for approval. So far, Delhi and Bihar are keen on providing cash...

-The Hindu The Left parties have always maintained that the financial statements and accounts of a political party should be made publicly available, and hence strongly rejected the order of the Central Information Commission (CIC) that sought to bring six national parties under the purview of the Right to Information Act, 2005. Disputing the CIC's argument that parties were public authorities, Prakash Karat, general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist),...