Firstpost: New Delhi: Thursday,
October 13, 2016.
It was on
this day 11 years back that one of the most important laws in India fully came
into force. The Right to Information Act, 2005 has helped expose some of the
most infamous scams in the history of India.
The RTI Act
mandates timely response to a request for information from a public authority.
The history
of the RTI Act goes back to the enactment of Freedom of Information Act, 2002,
whose objective was to promote transparency and accountability. Because the
government wanted the act to be made more effective, it was repealed and the
Right to Information Bill, 2004 was passed by the Parliament in May, 2005.
This received
the president's assent on 15 June, 2005. The RTI Act was notified in the
Gazette of India on 21 June, 2005 and it became fully operational on 12 October
the same year.
Since then,
the RTI Act has been used to fight corruption and has exposed deep-rooted graft
in India. For example, the RTI applications filed by activists Yogacharya
Anandji and Simpreet Singh in 2008 exposed the infamous Adarsh Housing society
scam, which eventually led to the resignation of the then Maharashtra chief
minister Ashok Chavan.
That RTI
application revealed that flats in the Adarsh Housing Society, a 31-storey
building, which was originally meant to provide residence for war widows and
veterans, were used to house politicians, bureaucrats and their relatives.
In the 2G
scam, in which the then Telecom Minister A Raja undercharged mobile phone
companies for frequency allocation licenses and caused a loss of Rs 1.76 lakh
crore to the Indian government, an RTI application by Subhash Chandra Agrawal
revealed that Raja had a "15-minute-long" meeting with then
solicitor-general Goolam E Vahanvati in December 2007 after which a "brief
note was prepared and handed over to the minister", but the minutes of the
meeting were not recorded, stated this report in The Huffington Post.
The RTI Act
was also used to expose corruption after the Commonwealth Games scam, in which
the corrupt deals by politician Suresh Kalmadi embarrassed the nation. The
report said that an RTI application filed by non-profit Housing and Land Rights
Network showed that the then Delhi government had diverted Rs 744 crore from
social welfare projects for Dalits to the Commonwealth Games from 2005-06 to
2010-11.
In 2007, the
RTI request filed by Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti, an NGO, revealed
irregularities in the distribution of food meant for people living below the
poverty line by the public distribution system in Assam, according to a report
in The Wall Street Journal. In 2008, an RTI application by a Punjab-based NGO
revealed that heads of the local branches of the Indian Red Cross Society had
used money intended for the victims of the Kargil war and natural disasters to
buy cars, air-conditioners and pay for hotel bills.
A PTI report
published in July 2016 said that an RTI query showed that only 12 members of
the Maharashtra Cabinet have declared their assets and liabilities details as
per Central governments code of conduct for ministers. Another one filed by
social activist Anil Galgali showed that as many as 118 complaints of sexual
harassment were filed at the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM)
between 2013 and July this year.
An RTI query
filed by Child Rights and You (CRY) revealed in May this year that twenty-two
children go missing in the national capital everyday with most of them being
boys aged upto 12 years.
Needless to
say, the importance of the RTI Act can never be overstated.
There are,
however, some problems with the RTI Act, the most important one being that the
huge number of RTI queries filed makes it difficult for public authorities to
respond to them in a timely manner. A 2014 study conducted by the Commonwealth
Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) revealed that over 1.75 crore RTI applications
have been filed from 2005 to July 2014.
According to
this report in The New Indian Express, there has also been a ten-fold increase
in the number of RTI applications to the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) between
2006-07 and 2014-15, said the CHRI study. The number of RTI applications per
day to the PMO increased from 3 in 2006-07 to 35 in 2014-15.
Add to this
the fact that a lot of the RTI queries filed are frivolous and we have a real
problem.
For example,
after the PMO website released a list of RTI queries about PM Modi, it was
revealed that one of the RTI queries was the following: "What is the speed
of internet of Wi-Fi in the PMO?"
Another one
went like this: "Has the Principal Secretary to PM, Shri Nripendra Misra,
ever taken his subordinates, in the Prime Minister's office, on a picnic?"
And if you
thought you had seen the most ridiculous RTI queries, consider this one:
"Enclose all the proper records and documents which show that the present
Prime Minister of India, Shri Narendra Modi is The Prime Servant of India and
not the Prime Minister."
The RTI Act
is one of the most crucial tools that we have as citizens. We should not misuse
this freedom for petty jokes.
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