Reuters India: By Amit Ganguly: Thursday, 10 July 2014.
The Congress party-led
government that drafted the Right To Information (RTI) Act in 2005 touted the
law as one of its success stories for the average Indian in the last election.
Whether it played any role in the election’s outcome is difficult to say, but
activists who specialize in RTI requests throughout India say that government
workers have found many ways to frustrate their attempts to get responses to
their questions.
Filing an RTI
is easier than it used to be, but extracting information is getting harder each
year, said Neeraj Goenka, an RTI activist in Sitamarhi, a town in the state of
Bihar.
“Bihar
government brought a number of amendments to the RTI act to discourage people
from asking questions. Bureaucracy is totally dominant here also like in any
other state,” he said. “From top to bottom, everyone knows how the information
can either be denied or delayed, and the application keeps moving from one
authority to the other for months.”
An RTI works
like this: a citizen files a request for information to a state office, and the
office is required by federal law to respond in 30 days. The trouble is, a lax
attitude toward enforcing the turnaround time coupled with an overburdened
bureaucracy can lead to slower or absent responses.
A report this
week said 66,000 RTI complaints and appeals are pending.
Goenka said
that he filed a request in 2012 to find out what kind of penalties bureaucrats
received for various mistakes on the job, and has received no information. “I
filed a first appeal also, but in vain. If this is the situation with the
information commission itself, which is supposed to be the guardian of RTI, you
can easily imagine the rest of the scenario,” he said.
D P
Choudhary, secretary of Bihar’s information commission, did not respond to
multiple requests for comment.
T Bala
Gangadhar Rao, an RTI activist who lives in Andhra Pradesh, said bureaucrats
respond to RTIs slowly because they know that they probably will not be
punished for not moving more quickly. Pradeep Rapria, a lawyer in Haryana who had
served as a legal adviser in the Central Information Commission, said that it
is hard to expect quick responses from bureaucrats who concealed information
throughout their career and now “have been entrusted to provide information.”
Prateek
Pandey, a freelance consultant in the state of Chhattisgarh who trains
government employees on RTI, said bureaucracy has a habit of overcoming
attempts to seek straight answers to people’s questions.
“If you want
information from the Chhattisgarh legislative assembly, the application fee is
as high as 500 rupees ($8),” Pandey said. The usual fee is 10 rupees (less than
20 cents).
Southern
Chhattisgarh is one of the centres of India’s armed Maoist rebellion. In that
part of the state, government officials often refuse to honour RTI requests
because of an exemption in the name of national security, said Pandey.
“During
training, an officer told me that someone had sought travel details of his
department through RTI, but the information was not shared as this would have
put them in risk because the information can reach to the Naxals. This cannot
be a reason for denial, for the detail sought was about the travelling you had
already done,” he said.
Chhattisgarh
Information Commissioner Serjius Minj said he did not know who denied that
information, but acknowledged that the government can withhold information for
certain reasons. On the fee, he said that the state assembly “is free to decide
the fee for the information sought. If anybody finds it a violation of
constitutional provisions, he can always challenge it in courts.”
In West
Bengal, the state information commission said it received 11,464 applications
between 2005 and 2013. Only 3,413 cases or 30 percent of the total were closed,
according to Amitava Choudhary of the National Campaign for People’s Right to
Information (NCPRI), and a resident of Howrah.
A senior
officer of the West Bengal Information Commission, who requested anonymity
because he was not authorised to talk to reporters, said resources are limited.
“Assume that the strength of the office is to dispose of 10 applications a day,
but if it receives 100 applications, then what can be done?”
Barely 10
percent of the applicants who file in Gujarat get replies in 30 days, said
Vinod Pandya who lives in Surat and says he filed an RTI for information on
charges that in 2009, the Gujarat government, then led by Indian Prime Minister
Narendra Modi, illegally put a woman under surveillance. The controversy
cropped up earlier this year when the UPA government decided to set up a
judicial commission to investigate the matter.
“People are
sick and tired,” he said. Pandya said it took more than two years for the
Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation in Gujarat to provide a reply on illegally
built buildings in the city.
Ashutosh
Tripathi, who lives in Faizabad in Uttar Pradesh, says the law has exposed
corruption in villages and panchayats in the state, but still “the rate of
disseminating information is very slow.”
“I know how
RTI helped in exposing wrongdoings in the construction of a village road in the
district. There are a number of examples like this but it is still tough to get
hold of the big fish,” Tripathi said.
Despite
shortcomings and loopholes, the act is one of India’s best, and has brought
change to the country, said Nikhil Dey, who campaigned for the law along with
activists such as Aam Aadmi Party founder Arvind Kejriwal, Aruna Roy and
others.
“This law has
worked better than almost any other law. The person who never talked to you,
who never let you get into his office, is forced to give you the information.
Somewhere in the back of their minds, they know they have to answer your
queries,” Dey said. “I can tell you thousands of stories of problems about RTI,
but nevertheless, what was the situation before?”
When Reuters
contacted India’s former Chief Information Commissioner Sushma Singh and asked
for her view, she said the states have their own information commissions like
the Central Information Commission, and the CIC “doesn’t exercise any
jurisdiction on them.”
Congress
general secretary and spokesman Shakeel Ahmad said the law was passed by the
UPA government, which showed its intention to ensure transparency in the
system, but in a federal structure, power lies more with the state governments
and the public should understand this.
“We have
passed the law, but the implementation depends on state governments. Central
government cannot even send a policeman in any state without their consent.
People should understand that Congress and the UPA wanted clean governance
which is why RTI was passed. State governments want to hide their wrongdoings,
and they misuse their rights,” Ahmad said.
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