Snatching land
through the barrel of gun
By Colin Gonsalves
Bengal’s Farmland Acquisition: An Invitation to a Rural Uprising, an interim report of the Citizens’ Committee on Singur and Nandigram, warns of mass uprising in rural Bengal if the administration lets industrialists continue grabbing agricultural land

Carving out foreign territory in India
By Colin Gonsalves and Pragya Freya Mehrotra
Setting up Special Economic Zones all over the country will be at the cost of villagers — depriving them of their land, hearth and home. Besides, it will compromise not only environmental safeguards but also national security, sovereignty and the laws of the land

The right to transparent governance
By Aruna Roy, Jean Dreze and Nikhil Dey
If government is a collective entity in the modern democratic era, transparency makes it distinct from the rule of yore. The gains of democracy cannot be complete without access to information. Deprivation stems from opaque laws, norms and practices, dispossessing people of their rights. Transparency opens the doors to progress and empowers people on a just basis. Societies that compromise the freedom to know limit the choice of their people and cripple their right to decide

One year of unfreedom
By Arvind Kejriwal
A year after the right to information became a reality, a reluctant government and its indifferent officials are finding it too burdensome to carry it forward. So, attempts are on to find sideways and steer clear of it except in Bihar where RTI complaints are being taken over phone

Social audit: Perspective on participatory legal framework for administration
By Siddhartha
t is widely accepted that delivery mechanisms in India require fresh insights. The challenge is to redefine the every day working of democracy. Social audit is an inclusive delivery model, which brings power to people

Yearning for information warms up the world
By Helen Nic an Ri
As a fundamental right, freedom of information is a touchstone to all other freedoms. A comparative analysis of international trends shows that the movement is rapidly gaining momentum across the globe, with developing countries setting more effective models

Media corporatisation and right to information
By Sukumar Muralidharan
Predatory pricing by large newspaper groups and growing corporate control over television and radio broadcasting have a direct bearing on the right to information

Is judiciary above the law
While the judiciary has been liberal in pronouncing citizens’ right to information, it is shying away from practicing what it preaches. If transparency and accountability is desirable for others, the rule of law should apply to judges as well

Editorial

Letters to the Editor

Securing secularism
By Amit Bindal and Latika Vashist
Instead of twisting the secularist ethos, that emanates from the Constitution, to suit politics, what India needs is an interventionist approach on part of the State to ensure that uniform civil code could be promulgated to seek an egalitarian society

When school mistook Albertson as albatross
Megha Bhagat from Chandigarh
A young life was snuffed because of the sheer callousness of the staff of a school hostel. The school administration has to learn a few lessons about the rights of children

Bulldozing lives alongside a listless river
By Michael Higgins
One of the oldest and largest slums in India, the Yamuna Pushta settlement in Delhi, was home to nearly 4000 families, housing more than 1,50,000 people. Ruzbeh N Bharucha’s book takes the reader into the lives of those poor families, whose past, present and future, were brutally demolished when the settlement was razed to ground in 2004

Other issues:

Development or developmental
terrorism?
By Amit Bhaduri
Wide dark shades are all the more stark as India shines through its swanky shopping malls, plazas and select plush enclaves, courtesy globalisation that today determines the context for economic growth. Its accompanying processes like liberalisation and privatisation ensure that the higher this growth, the greater the deprivation of vast rural underdeveloped India. A massive land grab by large corporations, actively aided and abetted by the land acquisition policies of both the federal and state governments, is yet another sad part of this economic epic

SEZs spell doom for workers
By Colin Gonsalves and Pragya Freya Mehrotra
Changes in the labour laws in SEZs are paving way for gross human rights abuse, weakening the trade union movement. The ‘free market’ argument with no level playing field puts workers at the mercy of ‘developers’ who never shy away from exploiting them to the hilt

Amendments that can cripple RTI
By Shekhar Singh
Strangely, government thinks that the only responsibility of bureaucrats is to ‘the government of the day’. In fact, the primary responsibility is to the people of India, to the Constitution of India and to the laws of the land

Statement by judges on the proposed amendment
By Arvind Kejriwal
A year after the right to information became a reality, a reluctant government and its indifferent officials are finding it too burdensome to carry it forward. So, attempts are on to find sideways and steer clear of it except in Bihar where RTI complaints are being taken over phone

Officials' bland ways and the RTI
By Colin Gonsalves
If the Right to Information Act is to have any meaningful effect, then information commissioners and public information officers should be given judicial training at the earliest

Setting bureaucrats right
By Nida Mariam
Most people do not know how to use the RTI Act and there is great deal of cynicism among common people, Shailesh Gandhi, the convener of the National Campaign forPepole’s Right to Information (NCPRI)

TOP SECRET! where does the buck stop?
By Colin Gonsalves
"India is becoming a militarised State." Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat in conversation with Nida Mariam on the need for accountability and transparency in the defence ministry

When world bank arm-twisted DJB!
By Suchi Pande
The Delhi 24x7 Project was seriously flawed, which was made worse by the clandestine move to sanction it under pressure from the World Bank. For seven years, the people were kept in the dark about the project undertaken to resolve a parched capital’s water woes

CIC on its powers and competence
By Siddhartha & Pragya Freya Mehrotra
In the Pyare Lal Verma case, the CIC clearly held that it has all the rights to manage its affairs and the Act under which it functions does not bar it from seeking the disclosure of file notings unless they are in conflict with public interest

Important milestones
By Suchi Pande & Siddhartha
Eversince RTI became a law, quite a few cases/events are setting precedents of sorts

When using RTI quickly paid
By Colin Gonsalves
Some examples of common people using the RTI Act to get their grievances addressed by government officials are recounted below. Such positive experiences are setting remarkable precedents all over the country

You can make a difference too
By Colin Gonsalves
A powerful tool to promote transparency and accountability in government, the RTI Act, 2005, enables the common citizen to access information which was earlier withheld by officials. After 59 years of independence, finally we can all make a difference by using this right.

Tales of torture
By Dipti Singh
Reeling under a draconian law and torn apart by military violence and searing hopelessness is the state of Manipur in the North East. Kavita Joshi’s film on AFSPA and its brutal aftermath also highlights the struggle by an indomitable Sharmila who has come to symbolise the resistance in a state on the boil for over four decades now

Know Your Rights
By Colin Gonsalves
The Human Rights Law Network brings the dignity of an individual in sharp focus through its publications. Detailed, exhaustive and crisply written, each book sharply focusses on an issue, relevant laws and lays them theadbare. The books are useful to not only the legal practitioners but also to activists, groups and the society at large