Hindustan
Times: Delhi: Sunday, 12 April 2015.
It took
nearly 15 years for India’s Right to Information Act (RTI) to finally become a
law in 2005 after the late VP Singh (who was India’s prime minister briefly)
first stressed the importance of a law that would give citizens the right to
seek and get information. But now that landmark act could become toothless in
far less time than that. If that happens, it will be a big blow for India’s
citizens and for true democracy.
Under RTI any
citizen can request, as her fundamental right, information from public
authority, which is bound to reply speedily within 30 days. Since its enactment
in 2005, not only has the number of RTI applications soared around 70 central
government offices alone received an average of a million applications a month
in 2013 compared to 100,000 a month in 2007 but it has also been a law that has
been instrumental in the unearthing of several scams and misdeeds involving
hundreds of crores of rupees.
RTI
applications have been instrumental in unravelling irregularities such as Mumbai’s
Adarsh Housing Society scam, which exposed an unholy nexus between politicians
and defence personnel and led to the sacking of a chief minister; the
scandalous Maharashtra irrigation scam; and the first hints of the cases of
corruption related to Delhi’s Commonwealth Games and Assam’s public
distribution system. Long before the CAG, the government’s auditor, came out
with its report on the 2G spectrum allocation scandal, a BJP leader claimed he
had filed 2,000 RTI applications to get documents related to what turned out to
be one of India’s most shocking scams estimated at depriving the exchequer of
Rs 1.76 lakh crore.
RTI
applications have revealed quirky stuff too. In 2012, a Class 6 student from
Lucknow wanted to know who first called Mahatma Gandhi the Father of the
Nation, the title by which Indians commonly refer to him. No one from the Prime
Minister’s Office to the ministry of home affairs appeared to know. After the
query was forwarded to the National Archives of India (NAI) and it too drew a
blank, the NAI asked the pre-teen student to come and search for the
information in its library and public records herself!
It was an RTI
application that revealed that hockey is not India’s national game and that the
Planning Commission had spent Rs 35 lakh on the renovation of toilets. But RTI
has also brought about some landmark changes.
Public
examinations such as the ones held by the Union Public Service Commission or
the entrance exams to the prestigious IITs are today transparent students have
access to their answer sheets and keys after the exams; the assets and wealth
of all public servants, including the Prime Minister and other ministers,
bureaucrats and others, are now in the public domain; and even the judges of
the Supreme Court and High Courts now have to declare their wealth.
The grim
truth, however, is that those in power regardless of their politics and in
spite of their glib lip service to transparency may be happy to see RTI
stymied. RTI makes those in power directly answerable to the people and that
can make things uncomfortable. Attempts to curb the law’s ambit have been made
by successive governments.
The UPA in
2009 wanted amendments to dilute the law but had to back off after RTI
activists protested. The NDA government has been more passive by allowing RTI
to hobble by itself by leaving key posts unfilled. There has been no chief
information commissioner, who hears RTI appeals related to top government
offices, such as Rashtrapati Bhavan, Supreme Court and the PMO, since August
2014.
Things aren’t
better in the states, where a third of the information commissioners’ posts
have not been filled. What this has meant is a pile-up of rejections, an
unattended heap of appeals (a redress option for applicants who don’t get a
reply in time), and a slothful official outfit that defeats the very objective
of transparency. Without an RTI machinery that works, India’s citizens will
lose their right to know and its democracy would suffer.
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