Daily Pioneer: New Delhi: Tuesday, May 29, 2012.
It will be interesting to see how the Supreme Court handles the contentious issue of what sort of information is relevant to be given out under the Right to Information Act, 2005. This is especially so when several constitutional bodies have objected to the ‘personal’ nature of information demanded under the Act on the pretext that such information would serve a ‘larger public good’. Organisations that have been facing the heat of the RTI provisions have made their displeasure known over the Central Information Commission’s frequent directives that they must part with information that does not appear to be in national interest. It is a fact that not all activists seeking material under the RTI do so out of a national good. Some of them have an axe to grind with the authorities or an individual whom they seek to target through the act. At times, the seekers of information simply get carried away by their enthusiasm and end up demanding a whole lot of material that is irrelevant to the purpose they are pursuing. Such cases have apparently been frequent enough for the Supreme Court to have recently observed that too many queries of a personal nature had begun cropping up in the name of RTI. It is nobody’s case that the Act must in any way be stifled or that organisations must refuse relevant information on the specious ground that the information sought is of a ‘personal’ nature. Often, what appears to be personal in nature actually has a bearing on the national good. Also, it is not unknown that organisations that are reluctant to give out information often take refuge in the claim that the information demanded is not relevant. But such cases are easily determinable and they should be dealt with accordingly. However, in the surge of the empowerment that the RTI provides, people also should not misuse the provisions. How does it matter in the national interest, for instance, to know why a politician or a judge attended a particular function or what he ate there? Such frivolous queries must be swiftly and severely dealt with to discourage the trivial use and misuse of a hugely enabling legislation like the RTI Act.
While the Supreme Court deals with all such complaints that it has received on allegedly dubious queries under the RTI, it will have to bear in mind that under no account should the Act itself be weakened in the process of making it less prone to misuse. May be the penalties that are already in place for frivolous complaints can be enhanced, but again, that should be done after careful consideration because genuine seekers of information must not be affected. Even the best of legislations have been unscrupulously exploited on occasions, but that only calls for those legislations to be fine-tuned to plug the loopholes.
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