The Hindu: Bengaluru: Sunday, August 13, 2017.
RTI Likho
crowdsources information obtained under the law for public portal.
It started
with a query that three friends filed years ago for official information under
the RTI Act. It has since evolved into a project that is set to make the Right
to Information law a more effective tool.
Nearly five
years ago, the three MBA students in their early 20s faced threats, red tape
and government apathy over an RTI query on illegal construction near a friend’s
house.
Amarpreet
Singh (28), Mukesh Sharma (26) and Ravish Sharma (26) had to split up, after
graduating in 2014 from the Apeejay Institute of Management, Jalandhar, taking
up jobs in different places.
But they kept
coming back to their shared experience with the RTI Act. The law theoretically
empowers citizens, but in reality, they found, it could work like the boulder
that Sisphyus was doomed to pushing up a hill repeatedly.
Their answer
was RTI Likho. The venture opened in April 2017 to help people navigate the
paperwork needed to file an RTI query, and to protect the identities of
whistleblowers. Over the past three months, the trio has been filing about 20
RTI applications on behalf of citizens every day.
These range
from students of public universities who want their mark sheet copies, to
people wanting to know the status of their FIRs, and even lawyers who need
vital information for cases. RTI Likho has a 16-member team three full-time
members and 13 volunteers.
Mukesh
Sharma, who works with SBI Life in Himachal Pradesh and helps RTI Likho
part-time, recalls their harrowing effort as students, “We filed an RTI query
and did not get any response. Our friend had to backtrack as he got threat
calls. Experiencing this ordeal was the turning point.” Mr. Sharma, who grew up
in Himachal Pradesh, adds, “We launched RTI Likho after getting enough
experience.”
The next step
is more ambitious: to build an RTI bank, a repository of responses open to the
public.
Mumbai-based
Amarpreet Singh says RTI responses will be crowdsourced from citizens,
activists, journalists, researchers and whistleblowers. “Apart from putting up
information on a public platform, the purpose is to avoid duplication. There is
no public RTI bank with collated responses. Most official websites are archaic
and all RTI responses are not published,” says Mr. Singh, who quit Exoton
Foundation, a civil rights and social justice non-profit that he co-founded, to
set up RTI Likho.
Currently,
the database has over 4,000 RTI applications and plans to go live within three
months. “We are reaching out on social networking sites and asking people to
send us RTI responses,” Mr. Singh adds.
Check
database first
The third
co-founder, Ravish Sharma (26), who heads the HR department of a
Jalandhar-based company, spends his spare time building the database and filing
queries.
To start off,
the founders pooled their savings. Now they are trying to meet the costs by
charging a fee for help with filing RTI queries.
Mr. Singh
said, “We will make it best practice to first search this repository to see
whether someone else has already got the information, before filing an RTI
query. This will reduce the difficulty of citizens and government’s workload.”
Mohan
Krishnan, president, National Anti-Corruption and Crime Preventive Council
(NACCPC), an NGO, has scanned and submitted to RTI Likho more than 500
responses that his organisation obtained.