Niticentral:
New Delhi: Wednesday, 14 October 2015.
The Central
Information Commission plans to celebrate this occasion by organizing a
one-and-a-half day long programme on October 16, which will be addressed by
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley.
Advent of
RTI:
According to
reports, the initiative for such law came from the activists associated with Mazdoor
Kisan Shakti Sangathan a non-party political group, which was founded in 1987
by Aruna Roy and Nikhil Dey. The activists were later joined by eminent
dignitaries from all walks of life. Prominent scribes, bureaucrats and
advocates contributed in this mission and thus the National Campaign for
People’s Right to Information (NCPRI) was born in the year 1996. Later that
year, the NCPRI along with the Press Council of India drafted the first version
of RTI law in India. RTI advocates from different states joined the movement to
implement it at the state and national level. The central government roped in
well-known consumer activist H D Shourie to draft the legislation and appointed
a working group under him. The Shourie Committee’s Report and draft law were
published in 1997 and this served as the basis for the Freedom of Information
Bill that was passed by the Parliament in 2002. The act finally shaped into RTI
Act in the year 2004 and was passed by the then UPA1 government. It was later amended
following few recommendations by the CHRI and the RTI Act 2005 was passed.
Significance:
The Act that
is considered as a new tool of public accountability, has been largely praised
for its unique features. Under this law any Indian citizen can approach any
“public authority” of a body of Government or “instrumentality of State” for
any information, barring prohibited ones, on a mere payment of Rs. 10. In fact
the domain was expanded even further and made applicable for bodies “owned,
controlled or substantially financed” by the Government.
Scams
unearthed:
This
revolutionary act, that was constituted to ensure transparency in the
functioning of government, helped to expose crucial information pertaining to
major scams like Adarsh scam, 2G scam, Commonwealth Games, Indian Red Cross
Society scam, etc. The Act increasingly became popular among citizens and the
increase in the numbers of applications sped up. According to a recent CIC
report, the number of requests pending with public authorities rose from
6,26,748 in 2009-10 to 9,62,630 in 2013-14, an increase of 53.5 percent.
RTI’s 10th
anniversary:
To mark this
occasion CIC has organized a programme that will have different technical
sessions. The topics for the session will focus on different aspects related to
the implementation and strengthening of RTI Act. The Commission also planned for
state-level workshops.
Flaws in
its Design and need for Revamp:
Many Limited
Government advocates however argue that while RTI is well intentioned it is
fundamentally flawed in its design.
The
pendency of RTI requests across departments and the appellate hierarchy is
perhaps the most damning data point on why the current design of RTI is flawed.
As an example in June of 2015 the pendency in the office of CIC had touched
40,000:
A total of
40,051 cases comprising 32,531 appeals and 7,520 complaints filed under the Right
to Information (RTI) Act are pending in the Commission as on today, as per CIC
official data.
Writing on
why the current design of RTI is flawed here is what commentator Shashi Shekhar
had to say back in 2011:
RTI has
resulted in new layers of bureaucracy that act as information gatekeepers while
fuelling activism that has taken a life of its own. It is unfortunate that in
its extreme manifestation this activism has today taken a macabre turn to put
the lives of many well-intentioned individuals at risk while proving to be
fatal for an unfortunate few.
Arguing
why the focus of the RTI Act was not on creating an open Government where
information was freely available, thus eliminating the need for both vigilante activism
seeking information and eliminating the need for gatekeepers controlling
information, Shashi Shekhar had this to say:
Hard
questions also need to be asked on why processes and systems of the Government
have not been reformed as a result of previous RTI disclosures so that avenues
for corruption were eliminated. Perhaps if we had focussed more on open
Government, we may have had better success on reducing grievances and the
fatalities associated with vigilante activism provoked by such grievances.
Describing
how RTI should be reformed from the point of view of Open Government, Shashi
Shekhar had back then argued that:
It is
possible that in a minimum Government, maximum governance (MinGov-MaxGov)
regime the focus of the RTI Act would not have been on creating conditions for
activism but on fixing the systems and processes of the Government to ensure
that information was freely available by default. This would have ensured
avenues for corruption were eliminated as a norm with the need for any kind of
vigilante activism being reserved for the rarest of rare exceptions.
With
RTI marking its 10th anniversary is it time to ask what will it take for us to
move to an Open Government approach ?
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