Indian Express: Anjali
Bhardwaj , Shekhar Singh: New Delhi: Tuesday, May 07, 2013.
A sound
whistleblowers’ protection law is long awaited. It languishes in Parliament at
the system’s peril.
Nandi Singh,
a resident of a remote village in Assam, was brutally attacked with axes in
September 2012 as a result of a complaint filed by him regarding irregularities
in the functioning of fair price shops supplying rations under the public
distribution system. He succumbed to his injuries on the way to the hospital
and his wife was seriously injured in the attack. Nandi Singh had also been
attacked a month prior to his murder and had filed a case and sought
protection. His wife and two children await justice.
Ram Thakur
from Bihar’s Muzaffarpur district was shot dead last month by relatives of the
mukhiya of his village. He had exposed embezzlement of funds in the MGNREGA in
Ratnauli panchayat using muster rolls and other information he had accessed
under the RTI Act. He had also alleged that the mukhiya of the village had
siphoned off the funds. Prior to the fatal attack, there had been several
incidents of attacks on him and he had repeatedly sought protection from the
police.
Nandi Singh,
Ram Thakur and thousands like them across the country have been threatened,
assaulted, even killed for raising their voices against corruption and
wrongdoing. Following the passage of the RTI Act in 2005, it isn’t just
officials within the system who have access to government information ordinary
citizens across the country are holding local officials to account in ways that
were unfathomable even a decade ago. Unfortunately, for these whistleblowers
who dared to show truth to power, there has been no justice. Neither have their
attacks and murders been properly investigated, nor have the cases of
corruption and wrongdoing they exposed been dealt with.
The
well-known case of Satyendra Dubey, a graduate from IIT-Kanpur who was murdered
in 2003, after he exposed financial and contractual irregularities in the
Golden Quadrilateral Corridor Project of the National Highways Authority of
India, had sparked the demand for an effective bill to protect whistleblowers.
However, over nine years and innumerable attacks on whistleblowers later, the
bill remains stuck in legislative morass.
The
Whistleblowers Protection Bill, introduced in Parliament in August 2010, was
passed by the Lok Sabha in December 2011 and has been awaiting discussion and
passage in the Rajya Sabha. The bill provides for a mechanism to conceal the
identity of a whistleblower, where (s)he feels that revelation of identity
would lead to victimisation or harassment by vested interests. The bill makes
it an offence to reveal the identity of the complainant and prescribes
imprisonment and fine for anyone who reveals the identity. In addition, there
are provisions to protect the whistleblower from victimisation resulting from
the disclosures made.
There are, however,
several lacunae in the bill that need to be discussed and addressed in
Parliament. One of the most significant is the lack of a clear and adequately
broad definition of what constitutes victimisation. It is critical to ensure
that under the law, in case of a complaint of victimisation, the charge should
stand established if the action or inaction that led to the complaint violates
any law, rule, policy, order or is not in conformity with the general practice,
procedures and norms in the matter, or is not based on sound reasons.
The bill is
also silent on penalties and compensation vis-à-vis victimisation. If the
legislation is expected to effectively deter victimisation, it must provide for
strict punishment and penalties to be imposed on anyone who victimises
whistleblowers. It must also ensure that wherever a whistleblower is killed or
suffers grievous injury as a result of making a complaint, action is taken on a
priority basis on the original complaint of corruption or criminal offence
filed by the whistleblower. Cases of people like Nandi Singh, Ram Thakur and
scores of whistleblowers who are poor and marginalised, bear testimony to the
fact that whistleblowers and their families need to be compensated for any loss
or other detriment suffered by them as a result of victimisation.
The law must
cover complaints against the prime minister, chief ministers and all other
public authorities, like the armed forces. Also, it is important that
complainants against the private sector get protection under this act. It is
widely recognised that corruption in private institutions has a significant
impact on the public. Given the vast scale of the private sector in India and
the corruption therein, it is important that this bill be extended to
complaints about the private sector when they either abet corruption (under
Section 12 of the Prevention of Corruption Act), or commit a criminal offence.
This would also be in keeping with the stated position of the government, as
indicated in the prime minister’s speech at a CBI conference in October 2011,
to bring the private sector within the ambit of anti-corruption laws.
The law must
take care to not empower anyone to dismiss or close a complaint on the grounds
that it is “frivolous” or “vexatious”. These terms are impossible to define
objectively and are likely to be misused. It may lead to a situation where most
complaints would be routinely rejected as being frivolous or vexatious.
It is the
moral obligation of the government to protect whistleblowers like Satyendra
Dubey, Ram Thakur and Nandi Singh, who represent the conscience of the nation.
A robust mechanism for the protection of whistleblowers in a time-bound manner
is necessary to promote an environment to encourage people to blow the whistle
about wrongdoings. A sound whistleblowers’ protection law might not be
sufficient to protect whistleblowers, but is certainly a long-awaited and
necessary first step. The National Campaign for Peoples’ Right to Information
(NCPRI) has been demanding that the Whistleblowers Protection Bill be
immediately discussed and passed by Parliament in the current session. This
legislation is a key measure for fighting corruption, and in conjunction with
other anti-corruption and grievance redress legislations like the Lokpal bill
and the grievance redress bill, will ensure better governance.
(The
writers are members of the National Campaign for Peoples’ Right to Information)
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