Indian
Express: Pune: Sunday, 18 October 2015.
The
track-record of the implementation of the RTI Act both by the central and state
governments shows there is little to inspire confidence among RTI applicants.
In August,
the central government opposed the move to bring political parties under the
RTI Act. In an affidavit filed in the Supreme Court, the Department of
Personnel and Training (DoPT) said if political parties were held to be public
authorities under RTI Act, it would hamper their smooth internal working, which
was not the “objective” of the RTI Act and was not envisaged by Parliament.
The Act,
which took 15 years to come into being on October 12, 2005, had generated high
hopes about making government functioning transparent, but it has been found
hobbling.
For starters,
RTI applicants who dare to take on the wrong-doers have often paid with their
lives. A case in point is the death of 17-year-old Yallalinga Kuruba of
Kanakapura village in Koppal district of Karnataka in January this year a day
after he filed his RTI plea.
Kuruba’s
death is not an isolated case. In the last 10 years of the Act’s existence, at
least 33 deaths of RTI applicants have been reported, the highest (nine) from
Maharashtra followed by Gujarat (eight).
The most
infamous case among these killings was of Satish Shetty, an RTI activist from
Pune who had sought information about land grabbing by developers along the
Pune-Mumbai highway.
Vijay
Kumbhar, a top RTI activist in Maharashtra, says the real culprits seemed to
have been arrested only in one case in Gujarat.
Shetty’s case
highlights the seriousness of the situation. The police “gave up” attempts to
locate the culprits and so did the Central Bureau of Investigation, which was
forced to close the case, only to reopen it after court directions.
Another big
problem is the antecedents of those being appointed as information
commissioners to decide on RTI appeals.
In July this
year, the Anti-Corruption Bureau in Maharashtra filed FIRs against two State
Information Commissioners in connection with the Maharashtra Sadan scam. The
two had earlier served in the state’s Public Works Department, then led by
NCP’s Chhagan Bhujbal. Their proximity to Bhujbal allegedly earned them the job
of information commissioners.
All the eight
State Information Commissioners in Maharashtra have been retired bureaucrats.
Earlier, a
State Information Commissioner Maharashtra was sacked after his alleged role in
the infamous Adarsh scam as the principal secretary of the state’s Urban
Development Department came to light.
Maharashtra
is not alone. In Kerala, the Governor had to suspend a State Information
Commissioner after allegations surfaced that he tried to interfere with a
vigilance investigation into gifting of government land by the chief minister
to one of his relatives.
Appointments
of retired bureaucrats, activists say, has adversely hit the implementation of
the RTI Act. Retired bureaucrats are loathe to give decisions against officials
with whom they had served for obvious reasons.
In states,
appointments of Information Commissioners are made by a panel headed by the
chief minister which includes a minister or deputy chief minister and the
Opposition leader.
Currently,
three-fourth of chief information commissioners in different states of in the
country are retired bureaucrats.
The
appointment of retired bureaucrats actually runs contrary what the Act
stipulates as well as what the Supreme Court has said. In 2013, the SC clearly
ruled that the persons eligible for appointment should be of “public eminence,
with knowledge and experience in the specified fields and should preferably
have some judicial background and possess judicial acumen and experience to
fairly and effectively deal with the intricate questions of law that would come
up for determination before the Information Commission in its day-to-day working”.
The apathy is
not limited to states. It begins from the Centre. The central government agreed
on the name of the Chief Information Commissioner only in June this year, a
full nine months after the last CIC retired. Since then, the highest RTI body
in the country had remained headless.
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