The article was originally published in Boom. Read here. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) recently told the Parliament in July that it had issued 1,122 orders to block Twitter content till June this year. In 2021, this figure stood at 2,851 — against 2,731 in 2020 and 1,041 in 2019 — showing…
The article was originally published in Boom. Read here. The arrest of Mohammed Zubair, journalist and co-founder of a fact-checking news website Alt News has sparked outrage not only on the issue of falling press freedom in India, but also on the issue of data privacy. On June 27, Zubair was arrested by the Delhi…
The article was originally published in Article 14. Read here. New Delhi: At least 470,000 unique identity numbers (UIDs) issued by India’s 13-year-old national identity database, Aadhaar, over nine years were fraudulent. The system is susceptible to being hacked or otherwise undermined, and its own recent warnings of misuse reveal its vulnerabilities. About 30 million of the poorest…
The article was originally published in Article 14. Read here. A Pune police refusal to reply to right-to-information (RTI) queries about the use of Israeli spyware Pegasus raise several questions about whether the military-grade hacking weapon was deployed in implicating lawyers, activists, and academics in the Bhima Koregaon-Elgar Parishad (BK-EP) case, which invokes India’s draconian counter-terrorism law, the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act,…
The article was originally published in The Taut [not live now]. Though a copy is irretrievable, you can read the crux of the story below. You can also view the video story here. Year by year, the Yogi Adityanath-led Uttar Pradesh government lowered its spending on developing minority-dominated districts in the state, until it finally…
The article was originally published in Article 14. Read here. New Delhi: For a country that was found to have one of Asia’s worst bribery rates in 2020, there appear to be very few complaining of corruption in the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi—if you count the number of cases registered with the Lokpal, India’s corruption-fighting independent, national…
The article was originally published in The Quint. Read here. “What happened to that?” As heated arguments on the Pegasus snooping issue flew back and forth in the Supreme Court on Monday, 13 September, senior advocate Kapil Sibal asked a pertinent question. He had been trying to establish to the judges how even the union government had acknowledged…
Original article here. The Centre on Friday denied a Right to Information (RTI) activist the official records relating to the management of medical oxygen by a government panel during the pandemic, saying no such panel had been set up in April 2020. In June this year, the government had denied Saurav Das the information sought by…
Original article here. New Delhi: The Central Information Commission has directed the Union government to provide within 10 days details of meetings, discussions and agendas of the empowered nine-member group sub-committee on oxygen that was set up to ensure adequate availability of oxygen in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. The Commission said that the Union government’s…
Original video here. RTI Activist Saurav Das Has said he filed RTI on numbers of deaths in UP and found discrepancy in the numbers. He has added the pattern of fudging data is similar to other states.
The article was originally published in Article 14. Read here. New Delhi: The number of people who died in 24 Uttar Pradesh (UP) districts over nine months to 31 March 2021 was, cumulatively, 43 times higher than the total official Covid-19 death toll reported from these districts over this period, according to mortality data for…
Original article here. The Central Information Commission (CIC) has in a significant decision decided to “accord precedence” to matters related to the COVID-19 pandemic “depending on the facts and circumstance of the case”. With this the panel has fulfilled a major demand of RTI activists who had been seeking early hearings in issues related to the…