-The Hindu There is no organised conspiracy against NGOs. It is in the nature of power to exercise greater control, and exempt itself from accountability. The recent changes in the rules governing foreign funding of NGOs under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) have been widely discussed. The last word on it will perhaps never be written. The UPA government initiated this and we see some concrete changes now. Sifting through the...

-The Telegraph Bhagalpur: An unusual demand of Rs 2 lakh by an insurance company in lieu of providing information to one Right to Information (RTI) activist from Bhagalpur has left the crusader in the lurch. Ajit Kumar Singh, the RTI Activist, had sought information from the Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) of India about the details of implementation of a scheme, mainly aimed at the economically weaker sections and also about the works...

-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: Retired bureaucrats never retire. Stumped? A look at the information commissions, the transparency watchdogs, all over India reveals that they have become a re-employment arena for bureaucrats. Even though the Supreme Court has advised looking beyond retired civil servants for posts of information commissioners and chief information commissioners, governments prefer retired bureaucrats over candidates with specialisations in other fields. An annual study by the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative,...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Union environment ministry has refused to release bio-safety research dossiers on genetically modified mustard developed by Delhi University under review for possible commercial cultivation, activists campaigning against GM crops claimed today. The activists said the ministry had turned down their request filed under the Right to Information Act for the bio-safety dossiers containing data on environmental and toxicity studies done on the GM mustard engineered with bacterial...

-The Times of India Despite a historic amendment in 2005, the Hindu inheritance law still suffers from gender bias. It is 10 years since the daughter has been brought on a par with the son under the Hindu Succession Act, 1956 (HSA). This historic amendment of 2005 never made much of a splash though, unlike other farreaching enactments of the same year such as RTI, NREGA and even the domestic violence law. The...