File and forget won’t do; Report on Western Ghats must be made public.

Daily Pioneer: New Delhi: Friday, April 13, 2012.

The Central Information Commission’s directive to the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests to make available a Government-constituted expert committee’s report on Western Ghats has not come a day soon. The report has been gathering dust for months now. The missive comes in response to an RTI application filed by a Kerala-based activist seeking a summary of the report produced by the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Committee. The information was twice denied by the Environment Ministry’s Public Information Officer on the specious grounds that the report was protected under Section 8(1)(a) of the RTI Act, which exempts “information…which would prejudicially affect the sovereignty and integrity of India…” from disclosure.

Thankfully, the Ministry’s false contention was trashed by the CIC after the former’s PIO failed to explain how exactly the contents of the WGEEC report could hurt the interests of the state. The CIC has directed the Ministry to not only make available the report to the RTI applicant but also post it on its website. It also directed the Ministry to make public all such expert committee reports within 30 days of receipt in the future. This is an important step in the right direction that should lead to more transparency and accountability in the Government’s functioning. For way too long now the Government has used such expert committees to simply buy time and avoid public censure. Over the years, the Government has found that the easiest way to deal with difficult issues without doing actually anything to solve the problem be it saving Yamuna or resolving an ethnic-separatist conflict is to first, set up an expert committee, a panel or a working group to ‘look in to the matter’ at the height of the problem. Then, as the initial momentum subsides and the experts’ recommendations come in, the Government will do nothing about them, as they are often inconvenient to implement.

This is the pattern that the WGEEC report followed. The Committee was set up in 2010 to deal with locals protesting against the setting up of a series of infrastructure and industrial projects in the Western Ghats that they feared could disturb the delicate ecological balance of the region. In late 2011, the Committee submitted its report to the Government, recommending a series of tough measures that needed to be taken to protect the Western Ghats. Implementing these recommendations would, however, require the Government to stand up to powerful corporates as well as deal with several State Governments, all of whom have ‘interests’ in the region. Hence, the report was conveniently shoved under piles of other such reports and would have stayed there had it not been for the CIC.