Deccan Herald: New Delhi:
Saturday, August 03, 2013.
Right to
Information (RTI) activist Aruna Roy and former Information Commissioner
Shailesh Gandhi will lead a protest at Jantar Mantar on Tuesday against the
proposed amendment of the RTI Act to keep political parties out of it purview.
National
Campaign for People’s Right to Information, the organization led by Aruna Roy
and Nikhil Dey has said in a statement that it would be an open public forum
where leaders from political parties have also been invited to take part.
Earlier,
NCPRI sent a letter to the Prime Minister to stop amending the RTI Act. They
had said that this was a “sharp reaction” to the Central Information
Commission’s verdict to declare six national parties as public authority.
“The Act has
enabled the making of informed choices and strengthened participatory democracy;
by enabling the citizens of India to monitor and access services throughout the
country. Any amendment to the RTI Act would undermine and weaken the process of
realizing various constitutional promises,” said the letter.
The letter,
signed by Harsh Mander, Medha Patkar, Mahesh Bhatt and Ashish Kothari among
others, alleges that India’s governance is going through a credibility crisis
as never before in which all sectors of governance and social formations have
been suspect.
The political
establishment has come in for most severe criticism, just and unjust.