Online surveillance: Seeking user info a rising global phenomenon: During the first half of calendar year 2016, social networking site Facebook removed access to 2,034 pieces of content based on requests by the Indian government and other agencies. This was starkly lower than the 14,971 content restricted during the six-month ago period, and 15,155 in…
Can RTI be denied on basis of citizenship?: Mr Dewa Tashi, a Tibetian by origin an employee of the Central School for Tibetans. He was appointed by the Central Tibetan Schools Administration. He filed RTI request seeking confirmation letter, children’s education allowance, all India LTC benefit, to which he is entitled to as per the…
Corridors of power insensitive to RTI queries: Hyderabad: It appears that the Telangana Secretariat does not care a hoot for the Right to Information Act. Even eleven years after the Central enactment came into vogue, the PIOs (Public Information Officers) of almost all the departments in the Secretariat, which is ruled by All India Services officers, choose…
NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi will release success stories of Right to Information (RTI) Act, during a programme to be held in October, to mark over 10 years of implementation of the transparency law enacted by the UPA government. The RTI Act, which was enacted in 2005, mandates time-bound reply to citizens query on…
Kolhapur: For the last two months, Ketan Sawant, a software engineer from Pune, has been struggling to file an online RTI application for his Rajopadhyenagar-based parents. The reason for this being that the Kolhapur Municipal Corporation (KMC) lacks the very facility.Sawant has been trying to file a Right to Information (RTI) application questioning the absence…
Since 2005, the Right to Information (RTI) Act has built an impressive trajectory. In an era of global youth rebellion, it seems to be opening up new space for India’s young to demand people’s right to know. Taking a cue from this new trend of students diggin up dirt, with the help of RTI, Rohit…
The Supreme Court has asked the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) to “scrupulously” follow its 2011 judgment that it is a student’s “fundamental and legitimate right” to access his answer sheets under the Right to Information Act. The recent order by a Bench led by Justice Ranjan Gogoi came on a plea by two…
Kerala Assembly speaker T P Sreeramakrishnan today came down heavily on lawyers stating that they are not the owners of the court and nobody has the right to deny the people their Right to Information. Speaking at the “Media Awards-2015” function at the Press Club here, he referred to the ongoing stand-off between lawyers and…
The latest Kashmir imbroglio has thrown up innumerable questions before all the stakeholders some of which are piercing enough to compel some pondering. One of the main questions pertains to media muzzle by the authorities. To an extent, it was reminiscent of dark days of emergency proclaimed by Indira Gandhi in late seventies. It won’t…
Brussels (PR): The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) joins its affiliates the Indian Journalists’ Union (IJU) has strongly condemned the ongoing media crackdown by the state in Jammu and Kashmir. The IFJ expresses its solidarity with journalists of Kashmir and urges the Indian authorities to immediately stop the crackdown on press freedom and allow the…