Tehelka: INTERVIEW: Friday, May 11, 2012.
The Planning Commission’s suggestion to bring social sector organisations under the purview of the Right to Information (RTI) Act has added to the existing debate to include NGOs in the Lokpal Bill’s ambit. Nikhil Dey, co-convener of the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information (NCPRI), an NGO at the forefront of RTI advocacy, tells Kunal Majumder why RTI would help the sector, but bringing NGOs under the Lokpal is an absurd idea.
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| Nikhil Dey, co-convener - NCPRI |
What’s your take on the Planning Commission’s suggestion?
I have no doubt in my mind about whether it should be brought in. A major reason for this is that the sector deals with public funds, irrespective of whether it comes in terms of donations or anything else. It is recognition by people that they want this money to actually go towards a public purpose. Transparency doesn’t mean that organisations needing government funds have to use them in a certain way; merely that they should be unambiguous about their usage. I think the commission should include all public-private partnerships as well.
How is the demand to include NGOs under the RTI Act different from the existing demand to bring NGOs within Lokpal?
The Lokpal is very different from transparency and RTI, and personally I didn’t like the Lokpal formulation at all. I think transparency should stream in many places, not necessarily only where it is brought under the scope of a criminal investigating agency. The main problem with the Lokpal demand was its impracticality, because it basically meant to include all NGOs. It is so vast that you can start being arbitrary, and we still have this problem with the Lokpal, even Jan Lokpal. The second problem with that impracticality was that the Lokpal is essentially a body for checking corruption with public funds. Any NGO handling public funds is already within the scope of the Prevention of Corruption Act, which the Lokpal administers, making the demand quite unnecessary.
There have also been talks about including the media under Lokpal and RTI by certain quarters.
I think this is imperative for anything that deals with public funds. When NGOs use these funds, they are in a very functional role they are just implementers. The media has a different set of responsibilities as opposed to NGOs who face a certain encumbrance when dealing with public funds. The government stepping in to control the media is very dangerous, but it does need to step in to regulate the way money manipulates the media.
Are you satisfied with the system that is in place when it comes to ensuring transparency of NGOs?
Not at all, because I think structurally the NGOs are very unaccountable. And that’s why I’m happy with RTI, because it leaves some space for transparency. The government can go after NGOs in any case, as they have done in Koodankulam and in the whole discussion about GM foods. What’s an NGO in front of the government? But the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, for instance, is not a funded organisation. Whatever funds we gather, we gather from the public, and since our accountability lies to the public, we should be transparent.
The Koodankulam angle was interesting. We actually saw that better transparency would have helped the NGOs.
I think transparency is a tool to help and strengthen NGOs. While sitting on a dharna, the government could tell us to follow this or that rule, to not sit on the road, but those are our rights, and that’s where the media’s rights also need to be protected as democratic rights; but the media’s role in the manipulation of money is what worries me.
But what about the NGOs? Is the scope of manipulation less in that sector?
There is as much scope in the social sector, but NGOs can’t manipulate minds. What I’m saying is that the accountability of the NGO sector needs to be thought about and debated from within. The government is still the one that will take final action, and that is why the Lokpal demand was impractical. But the RTI would at least give people a chance to initiate action and bring to light occurrences where they think the social sector has gone out of hand.
Kunal Majumder is a Senior Correspondent with Tehelka.
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