Bengaluru: People buy food online, file RTI queries by post

Economic Times: Bengaluru: Thursday, October 13, 2016.

The city prides itself as the Silicon Valley of India but when it comes to technology deployment for transparency in governance, the Union Government is far ahead while Bengaluru has a lot of catching up to do.

See for yourself if you have a Karnataka equivalent of rtionline.gov.in, through which the ministries and departments of the Union Government offer an online application option which makes the RTI (right to information) process a quick affair. Karnataka, on the other hand, with Karnataka One, Bangalore One and a separate e-governance department, is yet to take the RTI process online.

In Karnataka, queries filed online need to be printed out and physically sent to the office along with a fee. "Unless it is integrated with an online payment platform, there is no point of having an online option,“ said YG Muralidharan, an RTI activist who has worked towards creating awareness about RTI for over a decade.

"There have not been any RTI success stories of national importance from Karnataka, especially those applied online. Online applications hardly get replies,“ he said.

Karnataka's Chief Information Commissioner DN Narasimha Raju said that taking the entire process online was not easy because documents would have to be uploaded and payment made online. “It requires training and a lot of changes,“ he said, “We are looking into it. But it will take time."

This October 12, it will be 11 years after the Right to Information Act came into place. A large section of the population has never filed an RTI query and lacks clarity about what information can be sought and from whom. The processes are also long-drawn and paper-based.

If one requests for information from a public authority, for instance, one may have to wait for 30 days to get a reply.Sometimes, a department does not have the information or forwards the request to another department. Most RTI queries go unanswered in the first attempt and require filing of further appeals.

Right now, RTI is being used by individu als to get information that they are interested in. But activists believe that it needs to become a movement to ensure better governance. To achieve that, people need to be educated on how to use RTI intelligently. Publish a booklet which ex plains who to address RTI applications on which topic; publish a collection of RTI success stories in the past, Muralidharan suggested.

Manjunath Reddy , an RTI activist who was attacked for exposing a scam in road contracts, said, "Speedy disposal of queries and appeals and constant engagement with the public is important. The government should also promise protection to those who file an RTI."

The RTI Act requires departments to make proactive disclosures of a lot of information (on the website). This is hardly done. "If they proactively disclose, there is little need for something like RTI," Trilochan Sastry, a faculty member at IIMB, and founder of National Election Watch, said, adding that the way forward is ensuring accountability: "They need to be held accountable, not merely exposed."