-Mid-Day.com Politicians are not known to be fans of the Right to Information Act, but now they seem to have discovered that they can use the same law to obtain details on RTI activists' work, allegedly in order to know which activist they need to harass to prevent the next big expose. RTI activists claim that political leaders are making their proxies use the sunshine law to know what information the activists...

-The Deccan Herald The officialdom’s reluctance to part with public information sought under the Right to Information Act (RTI) is by now a well known fact. When nodal officers concerned disclose information, they hide more than they reveal, and often end up being penalised by appellate authorities.  However, an RTI reply furnished to an applicant in Devanahalli Taluk near Bangalore is simply shocking as it exposes the utter callousness of the nodal...

Appointments to India's secretive external intelligence arm, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), could come under public scrutiny, with the Chief Information Commissioner (CIC) upholding an order that the administrative process of an appointment is not exempted from the RTI.  Although the agency is likely to further challenge the order, the CIC ruling does throw open RAW's functioning and officials to RTI applications.  Passing an order on an RTI query seeking information...

Chief Justice of India S.H. Kapadia asked what a court must do if it finds evidence of paid news in an ongoing case Paid news, the right to information and analytical comment on the facts of a case that is yet to be heard were the topics of debate before the Supreme Court’s constitutional bench on media reporting subjudice matters on Thursday. Chief Justice of India (CJI) S.H. Kapadia, heading the five-judge...

If the daily haggling to get work done at Surat Municipal Corporation (SMC) has left you frustrated, here is another shocker. An application under Right to Information (RTI) by a citizen Kanubhai Shah has revealed that SMC charges much more than any other civic body for even blank forms, that too more than its actual printing cost. Sample this: An unemployed person wanting to apply for job in SMC needs to buy...