Frontline: National: Thursday, June 07, 2018.
FOR the past
one year, away from the public eye, an important process has been going on
inside the Central government concerning the rules by which the Right to
Information (RTI) Act is administered. It began on March 31, 2017, when the
Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) released the draft RTI Rules, 2017,
for public comments.
At the time,
it was expected that the DoPT would notify the rules after one month, once
public comments were received. It has been more than a year since then, but the
DoPT has not notified the rules so far. In fact, it appears that the issue has
been put into cold storage for now.
This new set
of proposed rules was the most consequential, as well as controversial,
proposal concerning RTI to be considered seriously in official circles during
the Narendra Modi-led National Democratic Alliance government’s tenure.
Frontline has
reported on the criticism of the draft rules by civil society groups and
opposition parties (“Diluting a right”, May 12, 2017) and on the note of
dissent sent to the government by a serving Information Commissioner, Sridhar
Acharyulu, in the Chief Information Commission (CIC) (“Draft rules and
dissent”, October 13, 2017).
The DoPT
files concerning the proposal to draft RTI rules, which Frontline has accessed,
reveal how the entire process of changing the rules lacked transparency right
from the beginning; how it was not prompted by any urgent issue of public
interest; and how some of its provisions do not appear to be in sync with the
spirit of the law. The access to the documents was facilitated by the RTI
activist Commodore (retired) Lokesh Batra, who procured the files after filing
multiple RTI applications with the DoPT over the past five months.
Second
draft
Among the
documents is a not-yet publicised second draft of the RTI rules.
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