Times of India: Mumbai: Tuesday,
March 26, 2013.
The murder of
yet another Right to Information (RTI) activist, this time in Bihar, has
re-ignited the calls for a national legislation to protect the rights of
whistleblowers. Ram Thakur (48), a member of the Bihar NREGA Watch (to monitor
the working of the government's flagship employment scheme) was allegedly shot
dead on the evening of March 23. Thakur had allegedly been receiving death
threats for speaking up against corruption in his village.
"The
continued attack on whistleblowers underscores the urgent need for a strong
whistleblower protection bill. However there has been no movement on the
whistleblower bill for more than one year," says Ruchi Gupta of the
National Campaign for Peoples' Right to Information (NCPRI), adding that a weak
whistleblower bill was introduced in Parliament in the monsoon session of 2010,
and was passed in the Lok Sabha in the winter session of 2011.
The delay in
the passage of the bill comes even as hundreds of activists across the country
have been assaulted and some killed in the course of their exposes of
corruption. To name a few was Satyendra Dubey, an IIT-Kanpur civil engineer who
accused his employer, the national highway authority of widespread corruption
and was killed in 2003 and S Manjunath, an Indian Oil corporation manager who
exposed a racket in adulterated petrol and was shot dead in 2005 and Satish
Shetty.
Transparency
in governance is one of the hallmarks of a good democracy and it essential that
the rights of those who work towards bringing such transparency are
safeguarded. That is precisely why the Whistleblowers Protection Bill 2011 has
been mooted. It seeks to establish a mechanism to register complaints on any
allegations of corruption or willful misuse of power against a public servant.
The bill mandates that any person making a public interest disclosure must
identify himself and the vigilance committee shall not disclose his/her
identity. Such laws are already in place in a number of countires including UK,
USA, Canada and even smalle countries like Uganda and New Zealand.
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