The draft bill seeks to create an institution that will be independent of those it seeks to police, and will have powers to investigate and prosecute all public servants, and others found guilty of corrupting them. A number of commentators have raised issues about the provisions in the draft of the Jan Lokpal Bill. They have asked whether it would be an effective instrument to check corruption. They have pointed to...

700 million Indians have cell phones, but 638 million still don’t have access to proper sanitation. At this year’s South Asian Conference on Sanitation, social solutions to the problem were discussed, including “naming and shaming” and the CLTS programme which gets villagers to map the open areas where they defecate There can hardly be a bigger taboo than sanitation when it comes to the government, bureaucracy or even the people...

The Supreme Court will on Friday granted bail to civil Rights activist Binayak Sen, who has been sentenced to life imprisonment on charges of sedition and for having links with the Naxalites. Earlier, Sen, 61, has challenged a Chhattisgarh high court order that rejected his bail plea on February 10. He sought bail contending that the trial court had erred in convicting him without substantial evidence. Sen had filed a petition in the...

The Lokpal (ombudsman) Bill would help fight corruption only at the centre and not in states where the magnitude of graft is alarming, cautions former Supreme Court judge Justice N. Santosh Hegde amid the escalating hype over the proposed legislation. Hegde, also the ombudsman for Karnataka, is part of the 10-member committee set up by the government to draft the new bill following the hunger strike by reformer Anna Hazare that...

The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) has directed its Director General (Investigation) to depute a team to look into the plight of bonded labourers in a brick kiln in Domanpur village of Azamgarh district of Uttar Pradesh. The Commission took the decision, taking suo motu cognisance of a telecast by a television channel recently of interviews with three such labourers. The workers alleged that they were being forced to work as...