Live mint: New Delhi: Thursday,
March 20, 2014.
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| A file photo of Central Information Commission office. A national study on the implementation of RTI in 2009, shows that RTI applications had a 50-60% chance of receiving a response from the government. Photo: HT |
The Congress
party is working hard this election season to remind voters of its historic
contribution to governance and anti-corruption by enacting the right to
information (RTI) law. Indeed, RTI was among the first pieces of legislation
brought in by the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance in 2005 and Congress
president Sonia Gandhi was at the forefront ensuring its safe passage in
Parliament. So, has nine years of RTI lived up to this promise?
India’s
experience with RTI is both thrilling and sobering. Thrilling because of the
enthusiasm with which citizens used RTI the Commonwealth Human Rights
Initiative’s (CHRI) estimation of RTI applications filed across the country in
2011-12 is 4 million.
While the
Congress has focused on its role in exposing corruption, the real power of RTI
lies in the fact that it has enabled citizens to understand how government
functions. This can have far-reaching consequences. In 2008, the Satark Nagrik
Sangathan, a Delhi-based non-governmental organization, began using RTI to
access information on the performance of Delhi‘s lawmakers across a range of
indicators from legislative performance, their local area development (LAD)
expenditure, to attendance in committee meetings like the police and ration
vigilance committees. This information was widely disseminated in the run-up to
the 2008 assembly election.
Researchers
from JPAL-MIT (Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at Massachusetts Institute
of Technology) studied the effects of this information campaign on voter
behaviour in 10 electoral constituencies. The findings were significant. The
information campaign improved voter turnout by 3.5% and high-performing
lawmakers saw an increase in their vote share; attending ration and police
committee meetings increased incumbent vote share by over seven percentage
points.
The
government on its part has been a reluctant participant. This may come as a
surprise, but the rate of rejection of RTI applications is relatively low. Data
from RTI Assessment and Analysis Group (RAAG), a national study on the
implementation of RTI in 2009, show that RTI applications had a 50-60% chance
of receiving a response from the government. The more recent CHRI study
estimated rejection rates at 10%. But this may soon change, as early findings
from a new study by RAAG suggest that rejection rates are rising rapidly.
Here is the
bigger surprise RTI applications matter. The genius of RTI is that it is
designed to engage directly with the key instrument of the Indian
bureaucracy paperwork and files. RTI applications are submitted on paper,
acknowledgment slips are mandatory and responses are time-bound and have to be
given on paper. In essence, every RTI application requires the system to open a
file. And once a file has been opened, the system simply has to respond, thus
triggering a virtuous cycle of action.
That RTI
applications lead to action is best evidenced in an experimental study by
economists Leonid Peisakhin and Paul Pinto who examined different ways of
accessing ration cards in Delhi, to find that filing an RTI application is
almost as effective as paying a bribe. Applicants who paid a bribe received
their cards within two-and-a-half months of submitting their applications.
Those who filed an RTI received their cards within four months. Applicants who
simply filed applications and resorted to neither the bribe nor the RTI route
were still waiting to receive their cards one year later.
This is not
to suggest that governments have embraced RTI. Although RTI applications are
difficult to ignore, substantive reforms reviewing internal rules and
procedures, updating record management and filing systems which are necessary
for transparent governance, have been firmly resisted. Moreover, crucial
provisions, like section 4 of RTI that mandates departments to proactively
disclose information, have been all but ignored.
And rather
than use RTI as an opportunity to identify information constraints faced by
citizens and improve business processes, bureaucrats have busied themselves
complaining about the vexatious, frivolous and voluminous nature of
applications. In fact RTI’s singular impact on our governance systems has been
the introduction of these words in to our governance vocabulary. So, in
practice, RTI is a reactive law that responds to citizens’ requests for
information rather than a law that proactively builds the foundations of
transparent government.
Bureaucrats
are not alone. Every arm of government has repeatedly sought to resist RTI and
calls to amend the law are now a regular occurrence. This is hardly surprising.
RTI exposes government decision-making to the possibility of scrutiny, thus
challenging traditional modes of getting things done. And this generates a new
set of pressures that need to be negotiated.
Responding to
the pressures of RTI requires striking a delicate balance between the need for
discretion in decision-making and the imperatives of transparency how to ensure
that transparency in appointments doesn’t curb the discretion to hire the right
people? How to ensure that transparency in political parties doesn’t encroach
on the internal workings of parties? Crucially, it requires tackling head-on
the causes of administrative failure and the breakdown of rule-based
decision-making, including the vexed questions of bureaucratic incentives,
political influence on career paths, staff capacity and so on.
Negotiating
this complex world of transparent governance requires imaginative political
leadership. On this, the Congress, for all its support to the idea of RTI, has
quite simply failed. Rather than actively engage with the challenges posed by
RTI, it has been at the forefront of efforts to amend the law. And this has
also emboldened efforts to resist RTI. It is now commonplace for bureaucrats
and politicians to argue that RTI has made decision-making impossible. This
failure to provide the leadership needed and build the foundations of a
transparent government is sobering, for in the long run it may mean that a
significant opportunity has been lost.
Yamini Aiyar
is a senior research fellow and director of the Accountability Initiative of
the Centre for Policy Research.
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