Times of India: Mumbai: Thursday, 01 May 2014.
TIMES VIEW:
With 16 days
to go before the 2014 elections tally is totalled, one of the big questions is
how heavy a toll the many scam allegations that surfaced during UPA rule will
take on its performance. In a recent interview Maharashtra chief minister
Prithviraj Chavan has attempted to put the issue in its 'proper perspective'.
He argues that it was only the enactment of the Right to Information (RTI) law
during the tenure of UPA-I that enabled big scams to emerge during its second
outing. But hard facts belie this claim. From 2G and CWG cases to Coalgate,
most big exposes didn't hinge on RTI.
It was the
CAG's report on irregularities in auctioning coal blocks that raised the storm
called Coalgate. In the 2G case it was media's relentless coverage topped by
another CAG report that blew the lid on irregularities. In the CWG case media
investigative work was strongly reinforced by CVC. RTI is admittedly a great
anti-corruption tool. It has been instrumental in providing critical
breakthroughs in the likes of the Adarsh racket. But it is completely incorrect
to say that without RTI scams which have battered UPA's reputation would have
remained buried.
After all,
scams had an unhappy habit of surfacing long before RTI was enacted.
Congressmen still flinch at the memory of Bofors. But they hardly stand alone
in the swamp of corruption. TMC carries the albatross of Saradha chit fund
scam, BJP of an incorrigible Yeddyurappa, Mayawati of both an exotic Taj
Heritage Corridor and a murderous NRHM swindle, Lalu Prasad of fiddling with
fodder, the list can go on and on. Chavan hopes that voters will consider UPA's
scam taint cleansed byits RTI halo. While RTI is certainly a signal achievement
of the UPA, the two are separate issues.
COUNTERVIEW : An effective
weapon to uncover graft
Chandan
Nandy:
Among some of
the most discussed laws of recent times, the 2005 Right to Information Act,
even in its infancy, has resulted in a sea change in relations between the
authorities and citizens. By all accounts, the radical law has helped uncover
corruption, fraud or embezzlement of public funds, including not just the
Adarsh housing scam in Mumbai but also former Karnataka chief minister B S
Yeddyurappa spending crores of money to renovate his Bangalore house, and official
incompetence. RTI is as much a necessity for citizens as it is a precondition
for good governance.
Maharashtra
CM Prithviraj Chavan's defence of the law and its success is based on facts
because RTI queries were the starting point of exposes in several corruption
cases, including the Commonwealth Games and 2G scam. From the 2007 scam
involving the public distribution system in Assam to misappropriation of relief
funds in Punjab in 2008 to the Bangalore-based IIM making its admission
criteria public, RTI has emerged as a powerful tool for civil society to
promote and advocate transparency besides holding the political class and the
bureaucracy accountable.
More than
aiding individual RTI activists in seeking information that the government
would otherwise suppress, the law has enabled people, especially in the
country's rural backwaters, to ask important questions about governance and
obtain records of decisions critically impacting their lives. As the principal
means to ensure no corruption scams take place in future the next government at
the Centre must continue to pursue a rights-based approach to governance,
ensuring high levels of awareness among people, making sincere efforts for
greater capacity building of principal information officers and appointing more
commissioners in the states.
.JPG)
.JPG)
