Moneylife: Pune: Saturday, November
19, 2016.
The Central
Information Commission (CIC), which had given the task of compiling success
stories of Right to Information (RTI) from across the States, to Pune’s
Yashwantrao Chavan Academy for Development and Administration (YASHDA), has
come out with a glossy, 120-page coffee table book. This contains over 50 RTI
success stories of citizens and several transparency initiatives by public
authorities.
YASHADA
reached out to Administrative Training Institutes of all States, seeking
success stories from them. It also held a workshop, inviting citizens who had
success stories to narrate through the use of RTI. Out of the entire
compilation in the coffee table book, 11 stories have also been sourced from
Moneylife.
Released
recently by Home Minister Rajnath Singh at the National RTI Convention in
Delhi, the hard copies of this book are unavailable for sale and only 1,000 of
them have been printed. The CIC has instead uploaded the book on its website.
Here is the link.
The book
makes for an interesting and exhaustive read. Regarding initiatives taken by
the public authorities, some of them are wonderful models for replication but
one wonders why the CIC or the government has chosen to ignore.
One of them
is from Bihar, which has set up `Jaankari’, a government-initiated call centre
that accepts RTI applications, first and second appeals over the phone. The
Rs10 fees for the RTI application is compensated through the premium rate
services of the BSNL applied when a citizen calls up 155311 for telephonically
filing RTI applications. It also has a helpline where citizens can report, if
they have received threats as a result of using this transparency law. The
system has been designed in an ‘information at your doorstep’ format whereby
the hassles of physical movement by the common man have been removed.
Another good
initiative, the RTI Act in Braille, an English booklet, `A Guide to the Right
to Information Act 2005 for the Visually Impaired,’ has empowered hundreds of
visually challenged citizens of Meghalaya to use the Act for their personal
grievances like procurement of certificates required for education/jobs and so
on. This is an initiative of the Legal Awareness Cell, Bethany Society and the
Meghalaya Administrative Training Institute.
S Rajendran,
Section Officer, Secretariat, Chennai on deputation as District Treasury
Officer at Thanjavur was disturbed at the larger number of cheques or Rs50,000
each, which were to be disbursed to widows of pensioners after the demise of
their husbands, but were returned due to lack of correct address. So, he
himself sought details of the cheques that were returned, under the Right to
Information (RTI) Act from the Public Information Officer (PIO) of the Directorate
of Pension at Chennai. A few days later, the Joint Director of the Directorate
of Pension, Chennai personally visited the District Treasury at Thanjavur and
provided Rajendran a long list of unpaid cheques, which had been returned as
the families of pensioners had shifted their residences after the death of the
pensioner. The list also contained cheques for medical treatment of the
pensioners who had passed away. However, the list given by the Joint Director
contained only names of pensioners and their PPO Numbers. Rajendran worked
relentlessly to procure addresses, with help of the Association of Pensioners.
As a result of these efforts, cheques to the tune of about Rs1.5 crore were
re-issued to 327 pensioners on 5 August 2016.
Another
interesting story is the Department of Publications, working under the Ministry
of Urban Development, which launched a portal www.egazette.nic.in to maintain
duly categorised gazette notifications online to provide easy access to
citizens. However, users were required to pay fees or charges prescribed by the
government to download the soft copies. This was in contravention of the
provisions of the RTI Act, 2005, which mandates all information, rules, laws,
and notifications to be made available free of cost to the public. C Ramesh, a
resident of Sathuvachari at Vellore filed a complaint, which directed the
Cabinet Secretariat to inform all ministries and departments of the government
to make available digitised version of the gazette notifications to citizens
not only for reading but also for downloading, without any charges. Consequent
to this CIC order, downloading of the e-gazette in the portal
www.egazette.nic.in has been made free.