Economic Times: Delhi: Wednesday, July 25, 2012.
The main objective of the Right to Information Act, 2005, is to provide access to information in order to promote transparency and accountability in the working of every public authority.
The RTI Act defines 'public authority' as anybody or authority constituted by law made by competent legislature and includes anybody owned, controlled or substantially financed directly or indirectly by funds provided by the government.
While deciding the status of any body as public authority, one important criteria is whether the authority is directly or indirectly funded by the central or the state government.
There are many organisations owned and controlled by the central government engaged in business activities such as commercial airlines, banking, mining, petroleum products, manufacturing plants, equipments, machineries, etc.
For the same, funds are generated by the business itself and funding by the central government is only for capital investment in such organisations and not for carrying out dayto-day businesses. Such business entities are different from public authorities such as municipal corporation and other authorities funded by the government.
Public sector banks established under an Act of Parliament are owned and controlled by the central government, but carry on this business of banking by raising deposits from the public.
They are not dependent on any budgetary allocations for their businesses. Although these banks collect public deposits, they are accountable to the RBI and not to the public for prudent use of such deposits.
Ordinary citizens seeking any information from these public sector banks are incapable of making any assessment on whether the banks are utilising the public deposits prudently and hence the basic objective of the RTI Act to make public authorities accountable to the public for use of public funds is not applicable to public sector banks.
MR Umarji (Chief Adviser –Legal), IBA Guest Writer
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