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By Venkatesh Nayak* A recent major development at the international level received very little attention in the Indian media. While the Indian electronic media went gaga over the Prime Minister’s visit to the United States of America (just as the US media was going gaga over the visit of Pope Francis to that country), very little reporting is available locally about the recent adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals by the United Nations General Assembly. At the turn of the millennium the UN General Assembly adopted 8 Millennium Development Goals resolving to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; promote gender equality; reduce child mortality; achieve universal primary education; improve maternal health; ensure environmental sustainability; combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases and form a global partnership for development. That exercise ended up with a mixed bag of results with countries doing quite well on some goals and defaulting on others. Now the world leaders have

By Fr Cedric Prakash sj* It’s September 21 once again, a day which is observed the world over as the International Day of Peace. Since September 1982, on this day, the United Nations has been calling upon world leaders to remember that the UN as an organisation was created in 1945, with a primary aim: to end all wars and to ensure enduring peace. The day once again will be full of activities and programmes perhaps high profile commemorations. These activities are perhaps needed. We need, however, to go beyond tokenism and cosmeticization. The grim and painful reality however remains: several parts of the world are still caught up in war and hostilities; in hate and violence; in division and discrimination. Everything in fact, which is the antithesis of peace! So much so, the UN Secretary General Ban-ki Moon, in a message for the day, makes a passionate plea, “I call upon all warring parties to lay down their weapons and observe a global ceasefire. To them I say: Stop the killings and

By Venkatesh Nayak* Earlier, I had written (click HERE ) about a new template that the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) has developed for capturing data about instances of attacks on RTI users, social activists, whistleblowers and media persons. Thanks to a diligent colleague who drew my attention to the existence of this template, I was able to bring this new development to your attention. I had pointed out some lacunae in the template which if refined, could become a major tool for collecting authentic data from the police stations about attacks on such socially sensitive citizens as a first step to towards reducing their occurrence. Having read that details of the article, Baijayant (Jay) Panda, Member of Parliament in the Lok Sabha from the State of Odisha, took upon himself the task of writing to the NCRB with suggestion that the template be revised. Kudos to him for his sensitive approach to this burning topic. He wrote a letter to the Director General (DG), NCRB. Apart from

By Venkatesh Nayak* In January this year, the Union Ministry of Home Affairs sent me details of the funds claimed by the Government of Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) from the security-related expenditure (SRE) scheme launched by the Government of India’s Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) in J&K. Now the Office of the Deputy Commissioner of Poonch district has sent me the list of beneficiaries under the SRE scheme for the last three years. After obtaining the documents submitted by the J&K Government to the MHA for claiming reimbursement under SRE scheme, we wrote to the Governor, J&K requesting that the manner of spending of SRE funds and the names of beneficiaries be made public because the media coverage of the RTI intervention had made it look like Kashmiri Pandits were the main beneficiaries of this scheme. The RTI data did not reveal the identity of the beneficiaries, except to say that some of them were Kashmiri migrants. The Governor’s office acted quickly and issued dir