The National: Samanath Sabramanyam: Friday, March 16, 2018.
Sixty-seven petitioners killed since Right to Information Act was passed in 2005.
When a new road was laid in Nanji Sondarva’s village of Manekwada, in Gujarat, he wondered why it cost as much as it did, and whether the authorities had embezzled or mismanaged the funds in any way.
His curiosity may have cost him his life. Four days after Sondarva, 35, filed a Right to Information (RTI) request, asking the local government for details of the road construction project, he was clubbed to death.
On March 9, six men in a car hit Sondarva’s motorcycle as he was driving near his village. After Sondarva fell over, the men attacked him with iron bars.
His father, Meghabhai Sondarva, identified the men to the police. One of them was the leader of Manekwada village, whose corruption would have been exposed by his son’s RTI application, he claimed.
All six men have been arrested.
India's RTI Act, passed by parliament in 2005, allows citizens to access information about public projects, funding and governance in a bid to improve transparency and accountability. Governments must release the details requested within 30 days, except in unusual cases when aspects of national security or personal privacy are involved.
Petitioners can choose to publish more widely, or ignore, the information released to them.
The danger of being exposed by RTI requests has rattled corrupt government officials and their associates in civil society.
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Shailesh Gandhi, a former member of India's
Central Information Commission, says the killing of people
seeking to expose suspected corruption through the
Right to Information Act could be discouraged by making
the information sought public anyway.
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Sondarva was the 67th RTI activist to be killed since 2005, according to figures maintained by the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) in New Delhi. The murders are part of a pattern of threats, assault and harassment. More than 400 such attacks and threats have been reported across India, CHRI’s statistics show.
Most of these murders have occurred in smaller towns and villages, Venkatesh Nayak, a programme co-ordinator for the multinational NGO, told The National.
The presence of law enforcement in rural India is weak and patchy. “In a city, you can reach a police station in 15 or 20 minutes,” Mr Nayak said. “In a village, you may have to drive for many kilometres to get to the nearest police station, and even then a constable may not be on duty.”
Smaller communities are also more intimate, Mr Nayak pointed out. When Sondarva filed his RTI request, word would have travelled quickly to others in the village — including those who risked being exposed.
Conversely, the size of these villages and towns makes it easy to pinpoint attackers. In 2011, Mr Nayak recounted, an activist named Ram Vilas Singh, living in a village in Bihar, had filed an RTI request to ask why three criminals facing murder charges had not been arrested.
“The murderers and the local policemen were buying their vegetables from the same vegetable seller every day, and he wanted to know what the police was doing to apprehend them,” Mr Nayak said.
The three men shot Singh dead in broad daylight and in front of his family. They were identified and arrested.
The murder of RTI activists is “a subset of the murders of so many people who fight corruption”, said Shailesh Gandhi, who served nearly four years as one of India’s information commissioners.
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