NDTV:
New Delhi: Wednesday, November 14, 2012.
In
an exclusive interview to NDTV's Nitin Gokhale, the Chief Information
Commissioner, Satyananda Mishra has said that one of the big drawbacks of the
act is withholding information. But
under constant pressure, he says, from the commission and from the people, from
civil society, from the media, the government officials are slowly opening up.
Full
transcript of that interview:
 |
| Chief Information Commissioner, Satyananda Mishra |
The Right to
Information (RTI) Act has really caught the imagination of the people over the
past seven years since it was passed by Parliament. The role of the Chief
Information Commissioner is the most crucial role as far as the implementation
of the RTI Act in the country is concerned. There are several issues that have
come up as far as the implementation of the Act and also its use or misuse is
concerned. To answer queries on those
issues we have with us the Chief Information Commissioner, Mr. Satyananda
Mishra.
NDTV: It
has been more than seven years now that the RTI Act was enacted by the
Parliament. As Chief Information Commissioner (CIC) for almost two years now,
what has been your experience?
Satyananda
Mishra: I must tell you that it has been
very gratifying that the RTI Act has done really well compared with other acts
we have enacted in so many other spheres. To begin with, this act has been
owned up by the people in a manner no other act has been owned up. You can
imagine that any attempt to amend this act even marginally has been resisted so
stoutly by the people that recently the government had to drop the proposed
amendments. So to that extent the RTI Act has found a place in the heart and
mind of the people. Many people have used it, in fact last year a million
people applied for information only in the Government of India. If you add the
people in the states then it would be 2 million people who used the RTI act. So
I don't think there is any comparable act which people in such large numbers
are using. So by and large I am very satisfied with the RTI act. It is making
right progress.
NDTV:
There is of course a flip side to this, that increasingly we hear complaints
especially from government officers that the RTI act is being misused by people
for their personal gain, to settle personal scores or settling enmities with
their peers in the government or in departments. What is your experience in
that?
Satyananda
Mishra: You know any law can be misused, so I cannot rule out that some of the
information being sought by the people must be used for settling personal
scores, not only with the government servants but maybe among companies, about
business enterprises between people. It is expected of any law but we should
not be deterred by such minor misuse of the law. By and large nobody has said
that the RTI is being used only for such purpose.
NDTV:
That's true. But also if you see last year, in 2011 the agitation for Jan
Lokpal became a very big agitation and it caught the imagination of the people.
Do you think the idea of Jan Lokpal will empower people or is it an idea whose
time has not come yet?
Satyananda
Mishra: As I have said in the past, in
some other occasion that when you go to battle you use both offensive and
defensive strategy. RTI is the defensive strategy, Lokpal is an offensive
strategy. Lokpal or the CVC or the CBI, all those instruments of the state are
meant to catch hold of the wrong doer and then punish him. RTI works towards
stopping the wrong-doing in the mid-stream itself. So if RTI is implemented,
well then we won't have occasions for Lokpal to catch hold of a corrupt
government servant. It strikes at very root of corruption by bringing in transparency
and accountability.
NDTV: Do you think there is scope to improve RTI
further?
Satyananda
Mishra: The improvement in the RTI is
not in the structure itself. RTI Act is one of the few very well drafted of
laws. The improvement needed is in the government offices where record-keeping
is in a very bad state. Computerisation of government records, indexing of
records, keeping the record well catalogued so that searching for subjects
becomes easier. Today, searching a government file is not an easy task. So when
somebody asks for information which is about 2-3 years old, you just don't know
in which file the information is contained in. So therefore, a lot is to be
done inside the government, that's A. Then B, people will also have to be made
aware of what kind of information they should seek. Seeking information is not
an easy task. You have to seek the right information, and then having sought
the information, you must know how to make use of it. So, it is a total
package, seeking the information - making use of it. It can't be that I seek
the information and then sit over the information. It makes no use.
NDTV: But then in that case there is also this
complaint or this feeling that government officers are the major obstacles in
giving out information even when ordered by the CIC under the RTI act. What is
your experience?
Satyananda
Mishra: To some extent you are right.
From the beginning the government officers have not been very forthright or
very forthcoming in giving information. Giving information means giving a part
of their power. Nobody wants to share their power so easily. But under constant
pressure, both from the commission and from the people, from civil society,
from the media, the government officials are slowly opening up. But I would not
say that it is the ideal stage. It will take many more years for the government
officials to realise that sharing information is better for them than keeping
the information to themselves.
NDTV: When
you look at the total package of RTI, do you see more and more people trying to
use it? Have the numbers increased? People who are coming to seek information
from the government officials; is it only to root out corruption or is it also
to get information about government schemes? What is the overall trend?
Satyananda
Mishra: In the last seven years of my
experience I can say from Central Information Commission that close to 70-75%
of information sought is for personal use. Only 20-25% information is used for
public purpose. But I hope as the years go by, more and more information for
public interest will be sought rather than for personal interest. Of course you
can't rule out...after all if you have a law and it helps at an individual
level than why should they not seek the information. But as time goes by, I
think more public spirited people will seek information for public purpose.
NDTV: Is
there a case to extend the RTI to public-private partnership (PPP)?
Satyananda
Mishra: Absolutely, with more and more
government (actions) taking place in collaboration with private enterprises,
there is a need to bring in even those entities under the Right to Information
Act. It can be nobody's case that we give away hundreds of kilometers of roads
or airports or ports to private people to develop and then the entire area
becomes a black hole. People should have information, if not about the entire
PPP but at least to the extent at which government resources are invested. If
some private person has invested his own money maybe the citizens have no right
to know about his money but surely the people have right to know about the government's
investment, if not in cash then in kind.
NDTV: And
what about the suggestion that political parties should come under the ambit of
RTI?
Satyananda
Mishra: Mr. Gokhale, I will not be able to make a comment on that because
currently we are hearing a case and my own bench is hearing that case so I will
desist from making any comment. But going back to the PPP, I have a feeling
that there should be a consensus between the government and the people that PPP
be brought under the RTI.
NDTV: Do
you think that the upcoming proposed Privacy bill will affect the
implementation of the RTI?
Satyananda
Mishra: I don't think so. I have heard
many civil society people expressing worries and apprehension about the Privacy
bill, but I don't think Privacy bill will have any particular effect on the RTI
. The RTI itself provides that personal information should not be disclosed.
And what more can the Privacy bill, bring in that is not there in the RTI
itself.
NDTV: Let
me take you a little bit back to your own career. You have been a long serving
civil servant and distinguished civil servant at that. Then you became the
Chief Information Commissioner. There is a constant demand that the bodies like
the CAG or the CBI or the CVC should be made autonomous, should be made more
powerful than they are currently so that they are not coming under pressure
from interested parties. What is your view on that?
Satyananda
Mishra: You know already the bodies
which were created under the constitution -the CAG, the Attorney General, The
Election Commission, the Union Public Service Commission- all these bodies are
already enjoying a great degree of independence from the executive government
and to the extent that removing any of these people is almost impossible, so
also the judiciary, namely the superior judiciary - the Supreme Court and the
High Courts. Now we hear, demands that that there should be more institutions
that should be more than or as independent as the CAG or as independent as the
Election Commission. I do not subscribe to that view. I do not see how creating
more such institutions will help unless you have a really sound accountability
system built into this new institution. We have already given tremendous amount
of freedom and independence to the bodies I just listed. Have we ever sat down
and assessed and evaluated what has been their role in nation-building?
Similarly if you make more bodies and do not have accountability in place, then
those bodies will be as good or as bad as the existing bodies. So I do not see
any particular merit in creating more and more so called 'constitutional
bodies'. Even the statutory bodies like...
I am in the CIC, but not for a day have I ever felt or none of my
colleagues have ever felt that anybody in the government has made even a phone
call to anyone of us regarding what we're doing. I think the CVC or the CBI, I
cannot say about the CBI, but I know the CVC also enjoys a great amount of
statutory independence.
NDTV: Is
there a case then, not to give too much of concentrated power in one person's
hand, like the CAG for instance? There
was a suggestion in the last 24 hours or so that the CAG's membership should be
increased, it should be made a multi-membered body. What do you think of that?
Satyananda
Mishra: I cannot have an opinion on that
because CAG as it stands today, there is only one CAG. It's an organisation and
he heads that. Whether the CAG should be one or a multi-membered body is
something for the Government and Parliament to decide. As far as I am concerned,
I think the CAG and such other bodies are doing an extremely good job and they
are within the mandate given to them.
NDTV: Mr.
Mishra, there has been a suggestion of late, that the information commissioners
should necessarily be persons of judicial backgrounds. What is your view on
that?
Satyananda
Mishra: I can speak from my own
experience in the Information Commission. I have been here for four years, I
have interacted with my colleagues who have been here before me. We have not
felt handicapped even for a moment by lack of any judicial training. The kind
of decisions we have to take here, we have taken them all our lives, when we
were in government, in fact more serious, more complicated decisions. Here the
decision making is about whether this piece of paper should be given to a citizen
or not. Because what is information? Information is defined by law as a piece
of paper on which something is written. So if somebody asks for a piece of
paper, like a file noting or a letter or copy of a bill or copy of a document,
this document, that document, all that you have decide here is whether it is to
be given or not given. Very rarely do you come across a case in which
application of mind in the sense of judicial mind is required. So that might be
less than 1% of cases. Just for less
than 1% of cases to argue that you need people with vast judicial experience is
somewhat exaggerating the work or type of role we are discharging here.
NDTV: We
are only talking about the Central Information Commission, what has been the
experience in the states? Because sometimes we hear that and as I was coming
here I heard from my colleague in Kerala, one of the information commissioners
there has been suspended due to wrong-doing, in misusing the position. Are
there instances where such misuse of power has happened?
Satyananda
Mishra: You know the Information
Commission's job is to hear appeals and complaints and that happens at the
second stage. This is the second appellate mechanism; whether it is the Central
Information Commission or the State Information Commission. A citizen comes
here only after he fails to get information at the first two tiers. So the
Information Commissions use very little power, they have very little power, so
the misuse is very unlikely to happen. But if it happens somewhere, it is a
complete act of aberration. There are nearly 100 information commissioners in
India today in state and Centre together, so if 1 single instance in some place
has occurred, I don't see how that can be said to be a universal
characteristic.
NDTV: No,
No, certainly not. That should not be taken as the prime example of corruption
or misuse. But coming back to organisations which keep demanding that they
should be exempt from implementation of
the RTI. For example, the CBI wants to be out of it, the Armed Forces
has been asking to be out of it. What is your view on it because some of the
information that they can give out is being delayed or is being withheld for
reasons that are not really understood by common citizens.
Satyananda
Mishra: You know already all the organisations which could have been exempt
from the RTI have already been exempted. Government has placed all of them in
the exempted list. CBI was last such organisation which placed in the exempted
list. When the law was being made the government must have considered whether
the Armed Forces should have been exempted or not, and in its wisdom the
government decided not to place it in the 2nd schedule to the law. But look at
the case of the CBI, even though CBI has been put in the 2nd Schedule, it has
hardly helped them because the law says that even an exempted organisation will
have to give information if there is an allegation of corruption. As you know
about 90% of the information held by the CBI is about corruption. What has
helped them really? There are just nominally in the exemption list.
NDTV: One
final question which has nothing to do with the RTI, you made a statement
recently in one of the interactions about the former Army Chief , General. VK
Singh, that he has given a call for gheraoing the Parliament, you made a very
strong statement that just imagine what would have happened if he were still
the serving General. What is your view about his behaviour both pre and post
retirement?
Satyananda
Mishra: I don't have any comment to make
on the individual concerned. He was occupying one of the highest posts in
India, we have all great respect for that post. When somebody asked me, like
you another reporter asked me, what do you think about this call for dissolving
the Parliament, I thought immediately that it is being made by a gentleman who
only a few months back was seeking the government to change his date of birth.
So if his date of birth had been changed to 1951 he would be our Army Chief
now. So if a person in this position would have this kind of idea about the
government and the parliament, I was really perturbed as a citizen. I still
think that it is a very disturbing idea that people occupying such high
position should have such extreme thoughts about our institutions which are the
symbols of our democratic nation.
NDTV: Thank
You very much for being so candid.
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