File RTI only when you have a connection, says govt; activists disagree

India Today: New Delhi: Saturday, December 16, 2017.

In May this year, chief information commissioner R.K. Mathur said the Central Information Commission (CIC) was working to clear all RTI appeals filed in 2015 by September 2017, and those filed in 2016 by end-2017. But even as he races against a self-imposed deadline, Union MoS personnel Jitendra Singh has come up with a novel idea to reduce the CIC's workload. On December 6, at the CIC's annual convention, he said that one should file an application under the Right to Information Act only when s/he has "a connection with the issue". "We should try to respect the spirit with which this law has been brought in instead of making it a nuisance... It should not be that I file an RTI about someone unknown or to prove [my]self as a professional RTI activist," Singh said.

Activists see this as another attempt by the BJP government to weaken the provisions of the RTI Act. They have reason to worry. By Singh's own admission in the Rajya Sabha in April, the number of rejected RTI applications rose to 64,666 in 2015-16 compared with 60,127 in 2013-14. At 977,000, the number of applications to the Centre was also higher in 2015-16 than in 2013-14 (755,000). As for the states, Amrita Johri of National Campaign for People's Right to Information (NCPRI) says, of the 4-6 million RTI applications filed every year across all states, only 45 per cent get a satisfactory response.

The NCPRI has reacted strongly to Singh's proposal. In a statement, it said that section 6(2) of the RTI Act explicitly states that a person seeking information was not required to give any reason for it. "Any move to introduce conditions to restrict RTI applications to only those issues to which a person is directly connected will not just be illegal but also empower public information officers to arbitrarily reject RTI applications...," the statement said. The statement also blamed the government for not filling up the three vacancies in the CIC.

The Centre's approach to the criticism was best summed up by what Singh himself said at the CIC convention: "[When] a former CIC said there were 36,000 pending RTIs, I said there were 36,003-three had been filed on his appointment."