Next meeting on Lokpal bill on June 15

The joint drafting committee on Lokpal Bill will be back on the drawing board on June 15, the government has informed the civil society members of the committee.

Updated on: Jun 8, 2011, 23:21:54 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The joint drafting committee on Lokpal Bill will be back on the drawing board on June 15, the government has informed the civil society members of the committee.

The civil society members have asked finance minister Pranab Mukerjee, who is chairperson of the committee, to postpone the meeting as Anna Hazare had prior engagements between June 9 and 11.

"The government has told us that the next meeting will be held on June 15 and we are working for that," said a member of the Anna Hazare's team.

With the day-long fast over, team Hazare is expected to come out with a detailed note on why it wants the Prime Minister, higher judiciary and official of all ranks to be included in the ambit of the Lokpal Bill.

The government had resisted including PMO and higher judiciary under jurisdiction of the Lokpal saying it will crumble the functioning of the two key institutions of India.

To counter the government claim the civil society members of joint drafting committee said the government to obliged to include all institutions under Lokpal as per provisions of the UN Convention against Corruption, which has been recently ratified by India.

The UN convention provides for strong legislative instrument to fight corruption at all levels but does not prescribe the model of the institution. "The convention requires that any public servant falling in the definition of public official is covered by this Lokpal bill," Shanti Bhushan, the other co-chairperson of the committee told Mukerjee.

The civil society members will also make a presentation on all issues where there is difference of opinion with the government and will give instances for including PM and judiciary under the ambit of the Lokpal.

Most civil society members expect the political brouhaha between them and the minister will scale down before the meeting and are expecting some concrete results. They have already announced to attend all meetings despite differences.

HRD minister Kapil Sibal and RTI activist Arvind Kejriwal have been engaged in a war of words on proceedings of the joint drafting committee so far. On Wednesday, home minister P Chidambaram said the Central government was committed to drafting the Lokpal Bill by June 30. "We are clearly committed to the goal that a bill will be drafted by June 30. I sincerely hope that the other five members of the Committee will return to the drafting committee's meeting," he said.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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