10 years of RTI Act, a positive impact

Deccan Herald‎: Bengaluru: Tuesday, November 08, 2016.

The first decadal study of the working of the Right to Information Act in the country has revealed the increasing role it has played in the interaction between the people and the government and its agencies. The study was conducted by the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative and it tried to make an assessment of the working of the Act in quantitative and qualitative terms, ever since it came into force in 2005. The result may be a mixed bag in a technical sense, because there may be scope for improvement in the light of the experience of its implementation. But the contribution of the Act has been overwhelmingly positive and it has introduced a new awareness about the rights of citizens. It empowered citizens like few other laws have done and highlighted openness and transparency as essential features of governance. It imparted a sense of accountability in official conduct and helped to make public servants responsible for their decisions and actions.

In practical terms, it has helped citizens to access information which was otherwise denied to them. It has helped speed up payments from the government, prevent and expose corruption, get around procedural and attitudinal issues in the functioning of the officialdom and to increase efficiency. It has given the media another tool to access information. People from all strata of society have used it to claim their rights. It has led to salutary judicial decisions in many areas. The lakhs of RTI activists in the country are a veritable army fighting the entrenched traditions of opaqueness and secrecy in the corridors of power. Some of them may have their personal motives and private axes to grind but that does not detract from the great good the law has done to public life. Democracy becomes meaningful only if there is transparency in the working of government, and the RTI Act is the law that best ensures it.

The study says that over 1.75 crore applications were filed under the RTI Act till now all over the country and a quarter of them were requests to the Centre. The numbers give only a measure of the interest of the people in the cause served by the RTI law. There are some issues of concern too. It has been noted that officials are becoming increasingly resistant and compliance levels are going down. Attempts have been made to reduce the scope of the law. Appointments of information commissioners are delayed and requests keep piling up. They should serve as warnings and people should be vigilant against attempts to dilute the law.