Central Information Commissioner Shailesh Gandhi recently took the extraordinary step of unilaterally releasing the minutes of the October 14, 2009 meeting between Union Minister Prithviraj Chavan and Central and State Information Commissioners on a proposal to significantly amend the Right to Information Act, 2005. The meeting's importance lay in the fact that it saw the hopeless isolation of the government side (Department of Personnel and Training, Ministry of Personnel, Public...

IMAGINE THE lowly brinjal you have always known turning into a sci-fi gizmo — with an uncharted potency for good and evil. Imagine a food turned into a pesticide — and you will have a measure of the essential uncertainty around Bt brinjal. When Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh announced his indefinite moratorium on Bt brinjal on February 9, he halted a juggernaut that could have swept India to a point...

* Main aim is to create asingle-window clearing-house for GM foods/crops * Planned regulatory authority to have overarching powers over state governments, existing laws * No room for farmers or civil society in approval process * Penal action for raising objection without scientific evidence * No independent risk assessment of data submitted to the authority * No provision for revoking approvals, inadequate liability clause * No informed choice for consumers...

By putting an open-ended moratorium on the commercial cultivation of the gene-altered Bt brinjal, environment minister Jairam Ramesh has ended the long-pending uncertainty over this issue. If, despite nine years of testing and safety trials to the satisfaction of the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC), some genuine concerns about the safety aspects of transgenic Bt brinjal have still been left unaddressed, they surely need to be addressed before the country’s...

Increasing scrutiny of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and, in particular, its chairman, should lead to reforms THE past month has not been a good one for Rajendra Pachauri (pictured above), the charismatic chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and director general of TERI, an Indian research institute. His numerous positions on boards and industrial advisory panels, in India and beyond, have led to charges of conflicts...