-The Times of India BHUBANESWAR: The Orissa State Pollution Control Board on Sunday decided to seal 60 hotels in Puri for allegedly violating pollution norms laid down by the National Green Tribunal. OSPCB regional officer (Bhubaneswar) Hadibandhu Panigrahi said the board was asked by the NGT to slap closure notice on the hotels on May 5. "Despite repeated reminders, the hotels have not applied for the mandatory 'consent to operate' (CTO)," he...
More »SEARCH RESULT
Promise on transparency not kept -Vidya Venkat
-The Hindu Without a head, functioning of Central Information Commission has come to a halt When the Bharatiya Janata Party won by a massive majority in the general election last year, one of the key election promises that brought it to power was transparency and accountability in governance. A year later, many of the electoral promises made on that front remain on paper — the Lokpal Bill and the Grievance Redressal Bill,...
More »RTI is being sabotaged by not allocating enough resources to make it work -Shailesh Gandhi
-The Times of India Blog India’s Right to Information (RTI) Act has caught the imagination of people in this country, while being appreciated across the world. A great change has come in India this decade in the power equation between the sovereign citizens of the country and those in power. This change is just beginning and if we can sustain and strengthen it, our defective elective democracy could metamorphose, within the...
More »Rapes, women’s abductions in Mumbai rise sharply this year -V Narayan
-The Times of India MUMBAI: A statistical study of crime in Mumbai in the first three months of 2015 shows that abductions of women rose more than one-and-a-half times (165%) over the same period last year. The response to the right to information (RTI) query also revealed that cases of rapes increased by 43%, although the number of gang-rape cases dropped from seven to four. The data sought by activist Chetan Kothari...
More »TV channels flout rules under garb of media freedom: activist -Vidya Venkat
-The Hindu Over 5,000 violations pertains to distracting ‘part-screen’ and ‘scrolling’ ads The Electronic Media Monitoring Centre (EMMC) of the Information and Broadcasting Ministry has reported 13,000 instances of violations of regulatory norms by television channels in 2013-14. These violations came to light after Guntur-based Edara Gopi Chand, an activist with Media-Watch India, waged a three-year battle to expose the poor regulation of content on India’s TV channels. Using the RTI Act, Mr....
More »