Activists fear that the government’s move to exempt the CBI from the Right to Information Act could have ulterior motives Kiran Bedi is convinced that the UPA government’s reluctance to give the proposed citizen’s ombudsman, the Lokpal, control of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the country’s premier investigation agency, is due to skeletons that lie buried deep in the agency’s cupboards.   The day Parliament was to discuss the Lokpal Bill,...

Corruption has become a serious problem, defying solutions. To curb it, several measures are needed apart from the Lokpal bill, the Judicial Standards and Accountability Bill and the Public Interest Disclosure and Protection of Persons Making the Disclosures Bill, otherwise known as the whistlblowers protection bill. The three bills, in their present form, do not appear capable of achieving the avowed objective. Like the Right to Information Act, these bills...

In the absence of legislation to protect women from sexual harassment at the workplace, the Supreme Court in 1997 laid down guidelines in the Vishaka vs State of Rajasthan in 1997. Thirteen years later, Parliament came up with the “Protection of Women against Sexual Harassment at Workplace Bill, 2010”. However, the Bill sees sexual harassment at the workplace not as a criminal offence but as a mere civil wrong, the...

Over 75 activists protested in front of the Red Cross building here on Friday demanding protection from the government in the wake of the murder of Chennai-based RTI activist S Bhuvaneshwaran. The group also submitted a memorandum to the district collector, a copy of which has been forwarded to the cell of chief minister J Jayalalithaa. Demanding a solatium for the family of Bhuvaneshwaran, the RTI activists also sought the arrest...

-The Deccan Herald   The Central Information Commission has held that the Right to Information (RTI) Act cannot be used to get details of orders or judgments from the Supreme Court or the High Courts.  Significantly, the transparency panel clarified that since the Supreme Court as well as High Courts prescribed their own set of rules for providing judicial records, the information seekers could not use the RTI Act for that purpose. “We have...