The Daily Star: Bangladesh: Friday,
September 16, 2016.
Arunendu
works for the Rangamati Hill District Council in the Chittagong Hill Tracts
region of Bangladesh. He is known for his dedication and commitment to public
service. So his office appointed him the designated official (DO) to deal with
Right to Information (RTI) queries from the public.
On receiving
RTI applications from journalists and the general public, Arunendu seeks the
advice of is seniors in order to prepare the replies. In his own words:
"As the Hill Council has to deal with many government departments, in
preparing replies to people's RTI applications we need to seek information from
several offices. Officials at such offices sometimes say there are objections
from the authorities on sharing information.” Arunendu, however, does not take
'no' for an answer. “I caution them that if I don't get the information from
them and cannot satisfy the people who have asked for them, they would be in
trouble too, not only me."
This level of
dedication to the RTI act in a public servant is rare. And yet, in order for
the RTI Act to succeed, citizens must believe that the law was enacted to
promote open governance and public officials must realise that it is meant to
be respected or else they may have to face its sanctions.
The two sides
involved in implementing the law - citizens who seek information and public
officials who provide it - both find it difficult to believe that the
government is serious about opening up its vast reservoir of information to
public scrutiny. Citizens, long used to secretive governance, are instinctively
sceptical about the sincerity of government's intention to be transparent and
accountable. Public officials are equally unconvinced that the government
really wants them to disclose information to the people which was previously
denied in the past and for which public servants took the oath to secrecy when
joining service.
In other
words, citizens must feel confident that they may ask public officials for most
of the information held by the government without fear or justification. Public
officials, on the other hand, must understand that citizens are entitled to
obtain such information as of their right and not as of grace. More simply put,
citizens are the rights-holders and public officials the service-providers.
There are
encouraging signs that we have made a start towards this mindset. This was
confirmed at a seminar in Dhaka last month, organised to discuss the findings
of a research project on the prospects and challenges of the implementation of
the RTI Act in the country.
What was most
heart-warming about the seminar was that almost half of the large gathering was
composed of government officials. They belonged mostly to the Cabinet Division
of the Government, which spearheads the implementation of Government's National
Integration Strategy (NIS). An integral part of this strategy is the promotion
of people's right to information. In fact, the Cabinet Secretary to the
Government, who was the chief guest at the seminar, endorsed many of the
recommendations that were made.
As was
expected, the research findings indicated that there was still a great deal of
hesitation on the part of government officials to play their role under the Act
in a robust manner. Many public servants are appalled by RTI applications from
people who would tremble even to speak to them in the past.
Such findings
were, of course, not very pleasant for many government participants at the
seminar. Some claimed that the picture was perhaps not always so negative. They
felt that some of their colleagues were slowly but surely opening up to their
responsibilities under the law, though their numbers may still be very small.
We very much hope that they are right.
We thought it
useful, therefore, to focus in our column this month on two positive stories
from the government side. They were reported to us by MRDI, an important NGO of
the country, dedicated to the promotion of the RTI Act. Both our individual
examples are cited from MRDI's report.
Arunendu, our
public servant in the Hill Tracts, explains to reluctant officials that if they
do not cooperate by providing the requested information under the RTI Act,
people could exercise their right to appeal to higher officials or even
complain to the Information Commission, which has quasi-judicial power even to
penalise them. He thought that as a member of the public, he himself expected
certain services from government offices like the one he was serving now:
"So I like to create an environment in the District Council so that people
can get access to all the information they require. As there was no provision
for people to seek information through formal written procedure before, a
culture of providing information has not developed. Now together with the
filing of RTI applications, and subsequent appeals that may follow, one can
seek legal redress if s/he is not furnished with the information. So for
obvious reasons, officials holding the information are now bound to change
their mindset and share information with the people. For example, in the past
there were no conscious efforts to follow the government rules on recruitment
for public jobs through a quota system. There were many instances of job quota
violations. Not anymore. Now there is RTI fear. Officials in charge of
recruitment can now afford to disregard undue lobbying from high-ups in favour
of the candidates of their choices.”
Iqbal is
another public official who is engaged in promoting RTI. He worked for the
Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General of Bangladesh. According to him:
“We've assigned designated information officials in all of our subordinate
offices. We uploaded RTI-related information on our website. And work is
underway to draft a disclosure policy,” says Iqbal. He further notes: “People
have a tendency to get information from us informally, verbally. However, one
organisation and eight journalists sought information from us through RTI
applications over the last one year. Not a single case of appeal was registered
against us as we furnished them with the required information on time.”
Such stories
give hope. It is important that they are made public as they will certainly
help generate people's confidence in the law. Among suggestions made in this
regard at the above seminar, one was to institute an award system by the
government, whereby public officials displaying exemplary efforts to make the
RTI Act work will be recognised annually and additionally considered for
promotion. Another suggestion was to hold Annual RTI conventions, with the
participation of all concerned, in which highest personalities of the
government would reiterate their support and commitment to the law.
Together with
such efforts on the part of the government, if citizens were to wake up to the
immense possibilities that the law offers for their empowerment vis a vis the
government, the RTI Act may indeed prove to be one of the most powerful laws of
the land for change, good governance and progress.
The writer is
the Chairman of Research Initiatives, Bangladesh, (RIB). Email
rib@citech-bd.com.
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