January 2010

Avani Kapur Read more »

Pratham's Annual State of Education Report (ASER) 2009 was launched last week. ASER is a path breaking effort at monitoring outcomes and pushing for accountability from government for monies spent. The report is based on a study of 575 rural districts in India and covered 16,291 villages, 338,027 households and 6,91,734 children. Read more »

Accountability Initiative held a consultation entitled Civil Society and Accountability on December 2nd and 3rd, 2009. The overall objective of the consultation was to debate the nature and effectiveness of civil society’s engagement with the state for accountability. In particular, it aimed to address the following key issues:

* Taking stock of existing experiments, understanding strengths and limitations

* Debating challenges of sustainability, institutionalization and effectiveness

The Accountability Initiative has recently launched a policy brief series on the right to information. The Right to Information Act (RTI Act) was passed in 2005. The RTI Briefs series examines issues relevant to the debate on right to information in India, highlighting international best practices with a view to inform policy debates.The first brief in this series looks at Section 4 or proactive disclosure of information under the RTI Act and highlights best practices in proactive disclosure of information from Mexico.