Business Insider: New Delhi: Saturday, June 02, 2018.
India’s
activists can rest easy. The Right to Information (RTI) Act of 2005 - a key
guarantor, at least in principle, of India’s democracy - seems safe, for now.
The central
government has reportedly suspended plans to amend the act, after its proposed
changes were met with a heavy backlash, not only from activists, but its own
information commissioners as well.
Information
commissioners are tasked with facilitating the implementation of the act
through the Central Information Commission (CIC), which acts upon appeals and
information requests from activists.
The CIC,
which met last week to discuss the proposed amendments, told the Department of
Personnel and Training that the RTI Act should stay as is and that the
amendments were flawed. An inside source confirmed this development to The
Economic Times. Hence, the government has decided against implementing the
changes.
Controversial
amendments
The draft
amendments to the RTI Act have been in the works for while, but were made
public by the Department of Personnel and Training in April 2017. As soon as
they were released, the government was criticized by all stakeholders for
trying to dilute the act.
One of the
main objections by information commissioners was against a proposal that gave
the chief of the CIC the sole right to assign a case involving an appeal or a
complaint to a single information commissioner as opposed to a bench of them.
This went
against the very nature of the RTI act, which requires the chief of the CIC to
be assisted by information commissioners when it comes to assigning cases. The
primary concern regarding this amendment was that it could lead to intervention
by the government something that would be harder to do if assigning cases were
a collective responsibility.
Another
controversial change recommend was related to the withdrawal of cases in the
event of the RTI applicant’s death. If implemented, this would have endangered
the lives of applicants.
In fact, this
is already happening. According to the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, 75
RTI activists have died since the passage of the act in 2005.
The remaining
proposals included the imposition of an application fee of ₹10 and a mandatory
deadline of 90 days from the date of the request to file an appeal.
Protection
for applicants
The decision
to cancel these amendments is the right one. What the government needs to
improve, however, is the security of applicants. As discussed in a previous
piece, their personal details need to be prevented from getting into the wrong
hands.
Furthermore,
appeals and requests need to be processed faster by imposing strict penalties
on information commissioners for delays and the government and its ministries
need to voluntarily publish information regarding their operations.
The RTI Act
is capable of affecting change, but its effectiveness hinges on the continued
desire to access information. It requires amendments, but not the ones that
have been proposed until this point.