Indian Express: Chennai: Sunday,
August 21, 2016.
Bashir, a
Kashmir resident, was excited when the then Chief Minister Omar Abdullah
visited his village. He was hoping that the visit would also bring roads to his
village, lacking proper road connectivity. But to his dismay, Abdullah took an
helicopter for the visit.
Soon, Bashir
filed an RTI petition on why the CM took the chopper and how much it cost.
Apparently embarrassed to explain that the village has no accessible roads, the
state administration soon laid roads. Bashir is now a local legend.
This is one
of the success stories that social activist Aruna Roy, instrumental in framing
the Right to Information Act, shared among enthusiastic students of the IIT
Madras on Saturday on the inaugural of the NSS batch this year.
The situation
has not been successful for all. So far 52 people have died trying to just find
information. One of them was shot right outside Gujarat High Court. Roy asks,
“if forty people asked the same question, which one person the criminals kill?
Bashir and
his contemporaries realised that asking simple questions could get a lot of
work done. This is what Aruna Roy calls as the power of RTI, a single question
that leads to a collective one.
This power of
the Act has made corrupt bureaucrats squirm. Manmohan Singh, when in power said
that this law has been designed to destroy the iron railing and framework of
India. Roy however said, “RTI will help reveal that all we have is a weak
wooden frame eaten by white ants from the inside.”
One such
expose happened in Rajasthan. Several villagers stopped receiving their
pensions as they were marked dead by official records. By demanding the ‘dead
list’ through RTI, Roy revealed that in the district of Kushalpura, out of the
40 declared dead, 29 were alive. Seven lakh people were legally resurrected
overnight all over the state!
National
security is another tool that is used to curb the utility of RTI Act. In 1997,
Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, the then Chief Minister of Rajastan said what an RTI
revealed on the poor status of a worn out bridge in the border district of
Balmer, was a threat to national security as the Pakistanis would exploit it.
Roy says
national security is being used as a red herring to hide scams in several
cases. She added, “In a true democracy one should know that while we have the
courage to talk, to listen and agree that everyone has the right to dissent and
yet not loose track of the fact that we must be scientific and rational.”
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