Hindustan
Times: New Delhi: Monday, October 15, 2012.
Claiming that
citizens would be deprived of a transparent and accountable system, activists
have vehemently protested Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s opinion about the
‘frivolous and vexatious” use of the RTI Act and how it can be a problem for
public private partnerships (PPP).
The PM’s
remarks followed the Supreme Court and the Central Information Commission’s
criticism of frivolous RTI applications.
“The RTI Act
has been used and owned by the people of India. It has gone a long way towards
giving ordinary citizens a tool, through which they can fight corruption and
the arbitrary use of power to ensure accountable, transparent and democratic
government,” the activists said at the end of an RTI Mela organised to mark the
seventh anniversary of the transparency act.
They were
criticising the prime minister’s statements on Friday during his speech at the
annual convention of the Central Information Commission (CIC).
The Prime
Minister had said the blanket extension of the RTI Act to PPP entities might
discourage private enterprises to enter in partnership with the public sector
whereas its blanket exclusion may harm the accountability of public officials.
Thrashing the
prime minister’s words, Anjali Bhardwaj, part of the National Campaign for
People’s Right to Information, said, “Apprehensions regarding these words were
discussed threadbare last year after the department of personnel and training
put it up on the website and subsequently dropped from the proposed amendment.”
A statement
by NCPRI, signed among others by activists Aruna Roy and Nikhil Dey and
journalist Kuldeep Nayyar, also attacked the prime minister’s idea of the
exclusion of PPPs.
“If anything,
a PPP project should have greater standards of transparency and accountability
because a public service is being entrusted in the hands of a private body.
Many ordinary people see the PPP model as a ploy by the government to escape
its responsibilities and accountability,” the statement said.
The RTI Mela
had become a celebration through songs, plays and sharing experiences about how
the participants used the RTI Act to demand information and transparency to
make officials accountable.
Participants
from as far as Manipur and closer home Rajasthan shared their experiences about
the use of RTI applications.
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