Team Anna’s Lokpal draft would soon have a rival from another section of civil society and could be more accommodating for the government. Chetan Chauhan reports.
Team Hazare’s draft lokpal bill will soon have a rival. Another section of civil society is preparing a draft bill that could be more acceptable to the government.
The National Campaign for People’s Right to Information (NCPRI) — an umbrella body of RTI activists, including Team Hazare’s Arvind Kejriwal and Prashant Bhushan — will come up with a comprehensive package on tackling graft, including a draft lokpal bill.
Kejriwal and Bhushan, who are on the joint panel drafting the lokpal bill with the government, are not on the NCPRI drafting committee.
"A sub-group is finalising a draft with other measures to deal with corruption,” said Venkatesh Nayak, NCPRI co-convener. He said it was difficult to agree with everything Anna Hazare’s team has been demanding.
The NCPRI fully agrees that the prime minister and cabinet ministers should be brought under the ambit of the lokpal and chief ministers, MPs, MLAs and councillors under the lokayuktas. But it disagrees with Team Hazare on the lokpal being made an overarching body with powers to investigate corruption allegations against the higher judiciary and civil servants.
It believes concentration of too much power in one institution could make it corrupt.
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.
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