The
Times of India: Mumbai: Tuesday, October 30, 2012.
An RTI
activist from the city who unearthed information on the long-pending dam
projects in Maharashtra has been served a notice asking him to prove that he is
the owner of the single piece of land that he owns.
Four months
ago, Jeetendra Ghadge had filed an RTI on all the dam works across Maharashtra.
The response he received was scandalous. Even as large parts of Maharashtra
reel under drought, dams initiated as long ago as 45 years ago were still works
in progress. Construction deadlines had been pushed endlessly and costs were
inflated, sometimes leading to a project itself getting drowned.
The
information was priceless but Ghadge had to pay for his curiosity. He and his
mother received a notice from the talati of Satara's Khatav taluka (Ransingwadi
village), where he owns 6.5 acres of land inherited from his late father. The
tehsildar asked him to prove that he was the real owner as someone has pressed
a claim for the same piece of land.
"The
notice is handwritten and illegible and it proves the intention of the sender.
It is clearly an attempt to make my mother and me run from pillar to post. But
such harassment is not going to deter me from filings more RTIs," Ghadge
said. This is not the first time he has faced such an attack from the
government machinery-once, in the past, the water supply in his house was cut
for a week.
The RTI
information that Ghadge got on the dams was damaging for the government.
Several dams, small and large, the RTI response revealed, are stuck: some for
want of funds, others because land will have to be acquired. Many others have
been stalled because of the crossfire between the state and the population that
will get displaced. To quote just two examples, a project started in 1967 is
still under construction while the Nira Deoghar project, initiated in May 1984,
has seen a cost escalation of 2,070%, going from Rs 61.5 crore to Rs 1,334.4
crore. It is now languishing due to a lack of funds.
As in
Ghadge's case, the going has become tougher for most RTI activists. While some
said they had personally not faced such blatant harassment, most conceded that
they no longer received a response to their RTI queries within the stipulated
one month and had to file an appeal in at least 80% of the cases.
RTI
activists, like other human rights defenders, are used to living on the edge.
Many of them are regularly harassed or assaulted whenever they have come too
close to the truth while some have even been killed. Manoranjan Roy, an
activist who had asked for sensitive information from the sales tax department,
was shocked when an officer landed up at his place to confirm his address.
"My wife was alone at home when this officer came. He enquired about my
whereabouts, asked for my cell number and left," Roy said.
Another case
is that of Rajeev Kumar, a professor from the computer science department at
IIT-Kharagpur. Through a series of RTIs, he had revealed flaws in the joint
entrance exam and was lauded by the Supreme Court as an "unsung hero".
But Kumar was suspended in May 2011 for "misconduct" and charged with
damaging the reputation of IIT-Kharagpur by making allegations on several
issues from the purchase of laptops to copying in examinations, all details he
had unearthed using the RTI Act.
Former CIC
Shailesh Gandhi acknowledged that the administration becomes wary once it
senses that a particular RTI user has the capability to bring official misdeeds
out in the open. "A certain kind of resistance is built up against him by
the machinery," Gandhi said. "Information is not revealed under some
pretext and the administration knows that once it lands up in the commission,
it will take some time for it to come up."