Livemint: New Delhi: Saturday, October 11, 2014.
If a Right to
Information (RTI) appeal is filed with the Madhya Pradesh Information
Commission today, it will only come up for hearing in about 60 years, given the
current backlog and the reported rate of clearance. A similar appeal will take
18 years for a hearing in West Bengal, according to the findings of a report
titled People’s Monitoring of the RTI Regime in India from 2011 to 2013.
This
assessment, done by RTI Assessment and Advocacy Group (RaaG) and Centre for
Equity Study (CES), was conducted ahead of the ninth anniversary of the RTI law
on 12 October.
The national
study on the implementation of the RTI Act covers all state information
commissions and the Central Information Commission (CIC). The study also covered
five states Assam, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, Bihar and Delhi in greater detail
by interviewing 2,279 people and conducting 95 group discussions.
The delay in
hearing appeals is the shortest in Nagaland at one month. It is three years in
Rajasthan and two years in Assam, the study found.
India
currently has no chief information commissioner at the centre since Rajiv
Mathur retired in August.
“One of the
biggest challenges today is that the central information commission is
headless. It’s a matter of great concern because it weakens the RTI regime.
There are huge pendencies in the various information commissions and in the
Central Information Commission. There are more than 25,000 cases currently
pending in the central commission,” said Anjali Bhardwaj, who was a coordinator
for the study. “This also questions the legal validity of all the orders passed
in the interim.”
The delay in
hearing appeals at the CIC is a little over one year.
The Prime
Minister’s Office, Parliament, the President’s secretariat, Supreme Court, all
the high courts and the Comptroller and Auditor General of India are under the
purview of the CIC, according to the country’s transparency law.
“With no one
in the post since August, it is unlikely that any appeals under these
departments are also being heard,” said Bhardwaj.
The
assessment shows that there are information commissions that are not
functioning at all. The Manipur commission has been shut since 2013 and the
Assam authority since March. During the study period, there was no chief
information commissioner in Rajasthan and there was no commissioner for more
than a year in Madhya Pradesh.
“We tracked
RTI applications to understand the amount of time it takes to get replies and
the chances of getting information in the first appeal (if the reply is
unsatisfactory),” said Shekhar Singh, who was another coordinator for the
assessment.
The study
showed that the national average of getting information after a first appeal is
4%. The chances increase to 34% in Delhi and 19% in case of the central
government.
Nearly 49% of
RTI applications asked for information that should have been disclosed
proactively without the need for filing applications, the study points out.
The study
shows that awareness about RTI is still a problem nine years after the law came
into force. As much as 64% of the people interviewed in rural areas and 62% in
urban slums were unaware of the law. The assessment says introducing a
grievance redress mechanism will help release pressure from the RTI system.
.JPG)
.JPG)
