'Last week I wrote about the Union home ministry’s admission under The Right to Information Act, 2005 that they do not have any information about orders issued to shutdown telecommunication channels, TV and radio reception and advisories for the return of tourists and pilgrims undertaking the Amarnath Yatra from Jammu and Kashmir (J&K). They also admitted to a lack of information about arrests/detentions of politicians, social activists and RTI activists.
'Ideally, the 14th convention on the RTI, on October 12, where Central and state commissioners were present, should have resolved against the amendment which reduces their collective independence. However, I am surprised that even non-bureaucrat commissioners also did not raise their voice against it. The least a convention of commissioners could have done was to ask for information on the status of commissioners themselves. But do information commissioners have the right to information on the status of commissioners?
'In what it claimed was an “exclusive story”, broadcast at around 3.30 pm on October 11, the Times Now channel claimed that Pakistani social media accounts were responsible for the hashtag #GoBackModi trending on Twitter ahead of the Prime Minister’s meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Chennai... Though many media reports claimed that Pakistani users were behind trending #GoBackModi in India, Twitter trends are region-specific. This means that for a topic to trend in India, users from India need to tweet on the issue.
'In an indictment of the Central Board of Direct Taxes’s (CBDT) functioning, a top Indian Revenue Service (IRS) official has accused Pramod Chandra Mody, chairman of India’s top tax administration body, of giving an unlawful directive to bury a “sensitive case” involving “serious allegations”. In what is an equally incriminating charge against the Narendra Modi government, the official said that the CBDT chairman tried to entice her to fall in line by claiming that he had secured the top position only because of a “successful search” operation against an opposition leader.
'Ahead of a press conference on October 4, the Indian Air Force released a promotional video about the Balakot airstrike that was carried out in February on a target in Pakistan in the aftermath of the Pulwama terror attack. However, several media outlets reported the representational video as real footage that offered evidence of the airstrike in Pakistan. At the time of the attack, there had been some scepticism about what targets India had actually struck. While India said its bombs had destroyed a terror training camp, Pakistan claimed that only some trees had been hit.
'Last week, two Dalit children, aged 10 and 12, were beaten to death when they were defecating next to a road in Shivpuri, Madhya Pradesh. Their village has been declared and verified ‘open defecation free’ (ODF) as far as the Swachh Bharat Mission’s database is concerned, but their family had no access to a toilet... According to the SBM database, as of September 26, all villages had declared themselves ODF and 90% of villages had undergone first-level verification. The authenticity of the information contained in this database is questionable.
'Rural India is now ‘open-defecation free’. With this declaration on Wednesday, prime minister Narendra Modi has ‘fulfilled’ at least one of the many promises he made when he first came to power in 2014. Except that lakhs of Indians will still continue to defecate in the open. By laying claim to the ODF status, the prime minister has allowed the government machinery to stop bothering about the problem from now on. And that is only one aspect of the entire issue...'
'Just weeks before the state assembly election, Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis will have to face a criminal trial for allegedly failing to furnish details of two pending criminal cases in his election affidavit in 2014...'
'The decision of a bench of the Delhi High Court of comprising Justices D N Patel and C Hari Shankar on Friday September 27, to issue notices to different government bodies – the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) and its wings, the Serious Fraud Investigation Office (SFIO) and the Registrar of Companies (RoC), the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and the National Housing Bank (NHB) – to investigate the allegations levelled in a public interest litigation (PIL) filed by a non-government organisation, the Citizens Whistle Blowers Forum against I
'It seems as though the Narendra Modi government is making an all-out effort to save controversial Indian Police Official (IPS) official Rakesh Asthana, as the Delhi high court deadline to complete the bribery investigation against him – September 30 – looms. On May 31, the high court had given the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) a four-month deadline... Displaying unusual alacrity, the government has moved out or changed all four officials handling the Asthana probe. This includes additional director M.N. Rao, who was removed on July 5...'
