Times of India: Goa: Friday, October 25, 2013.
Goa took the plunge to bring in transparency in
government functioning by being the first state in the country to adopt and
notify the Right to Information (RTI) Act in 1997.
But it was a partial attempt, with applicants
seeking information from government departments required to specify why they
needed the same. There was also no provision for a state information
commissioner to address applicants' grievances of poor or improper information.
The Act's raison d'etre received a fresh lease of
life in Goa in 2006, a few months after the Central RTI Act superseded the
state Act in October 2005. The doors of the government opened a tad more widely
to the public. And thanks to the central Act, Goa got a state information
commission.
But with the opening up came stronger ways of
closing up. While the first chief information commissioner (CIC) served the
entire three-year appointment, for considerable periods of time between March
2009 and September 2012 the posts of CIC and state information commissioner
(SIC) remained vacant. Nadir was hit for a year up to September 2013 when both
the SIC and CIC posts remained vacant together. Over 1,000 RTI appeals are
currently pending at the SIC office.
RTI activists view this not just as government
apathy, but more as a smart way of frustrating applicants. Aires Rodrigues, an
advocate, said regardless of the governments in power, when vacancies emerged
in the SIC no urgency was shown towards filling the posts immediately.
When the first CIC, A Venkatratnam, retired in
March 2009, the appointment of M S Keni as CIC was made seven months later, in
October 2009, even though the post of SIC was filled instantly. But when SIC
Afonso Araujo, appointed on March 4, 2009, retired in September 2010 there was
no attempt to fill the post until 2012. The commission functioned with only CIC
Keni until he too retired on July 29, 2012.
Post-September 2012, the information commission
became completely dysfunctional with no member chosen to dispose appeals.
An RTI applicant, refusing to be named for fear of
being targeted, said the government should ideally be above suspicion, but this
is not the case with the present regime.
Congress spokesperson Sudeep Tamankar, offering
his own example, said his RTI application to the law department was kept
pending for over two months (RTI applications have to be replied to in 30
days). "I don't think public information officers-PIOs-would have dared to
do this if the information commission was functioning," said Tamankar.
The government's recent circular making it
mandatory for RTI applicants to provide evidence of their Indian citizenship
was another regressive step, said activists. Following public furore, chief
minister Manohar Parrikar claimed the circular was wrongly worded and that
proof of citizenship would not be applicable to all.