Bar & Bench: New Delhi: Saturday, July 28, 2018.
Who will
benefit from the latest proposed amendments to the RTI?
Prime
Minister Narendra Modi had famously said ‘na khaaunga, na khane dunga’
referring to how his administration would keep corruption at bay. Positioned
against the multi-million dollar corruption scandals of the previous UPA
regime, this appealed to a large section of the population.
“If fighting
corruption is their goal, why do they want to weaken the RTI?” asked Rolly Shivhare,
an RTI activist from Bhopal. Transparency is equal to reduced corruption which
is equal to efficient government, she explained.
The Right To
Information Act 2005 is considered to be one of the strongest transparency
legislations in the world. According to Transparency International close to 2.5
crore, RTI applications were filed between 2006 and 2016, making the RTI one of
the most widely used pieces of legislations in the world.
Bar and Bench
spoke to RTI activists from five states to understand what they think of the
latest proposed amendments to the RTI, how RTI is important to them and how
they have seen a different India since the Act came into being in 2005.
Ajay Jangid,
39, is a businessman in Surat. In the early 2000s, he was caught in a civil
suit that required land records to cushion his case in court. After the RTI Act
was passed, he managed to retrieve documents from government records he had
wanted for years, within merely a few months.
“Since then,
I have spent a good chunk of my time creating awareness about the RTI,” he
said. He runs two toll-free helplines in Surat to help people use RTI for their
benefit.
According to
Jangid, the proposal to change the tenure of information commissioners is the
scariest part of the proposed amendment.
Autonomy of
the Information Commission
The Amendment
Bill which has been introduced in the Rajya Sabha for consideration and passage
attempts to change the tenure of information commissioners at the centre and
the states from “a term of five years” to “terms as may be prescribed by the
central government”.
“The
Information Commissioners will become like bonded labours to the central
government,” Jangid said. “If they continue to not give out information that
might be embarrassing to the government, they will be in service,” he said.
One of the
recent high-profile examples where the Information Commission used its autonomy
was in 2016. When questions were raised about Prime Minister Modi’s
undergraduate degree, the Central Information Commission directed Delhi
University to allow inspection of its records from 1978 – the year Modi claims
to have graduated from the University. Subsequently, the institution filed a
plea asking the Delhi High Court to set aside the commission’s order.
“If the
tenure of the Information Commissioner is the government’s discretion, then
something like the 2016 order to Delhi University will never happen,” said
Shivahare.
If the latest
changes come into force, the autonomy of the Information Commissions will be
under threat, said Venaktesh Nayak of the New Delhi based Commonwealth Human
Rights Initiative.
Since the
Information Commission is autonomous, the RTI activists have found courage to
appeal to them against non-compliance of government and bureaucratic bodies to
release information.
Ashish Ranjan
of Jan Jagran Shakti Sangathan based in Araria district of Bihar returned from
the far reaches of Jamui and East Champaran districts in the first week of
July. He had gone to investigate the deaths of three RTI activists, who were
allegedly killed in the month of June.
“What does it
say when RTI activists are being killed for the work they do? Who does their
work hurt? That is fairly commonsensical,” said Shivhare.
In the past
year, Ranjan has filed RTIs seeking information on government entitlements
reaching flood-affected populations of Bihar, cost of thousands of solar bulbs
installed in rural Bihar and land ownership records of farmers.
Dent to the
federal structure
According to
Ranjan, the latest amendments will severely weaken the federal structure of the
country by taking away from the powers of the State Information Commissions
(SIC).
“Why does the
Centre want to control information given out by the states?” he asked.
The three RTI
activists who were killed, said Rajan, had ruffled many feathers in positions
of power in their own districts.
“If the SICs
are not powerful enough, do you expect a person from rural Jamui to keep
knocking on the doors of the courts?” he asked.
It is in
these places, far away from the spotlight of capital cities, that the
transparency law is most useful.
“When food doesn’t
reach the ration shops for weeks, when there is no teacher appointed to your
children’s school and when essential medicines don’t reach the primary health
care centres in your village, that is when an RTI becomes essential,” said
Chakradhar, a Vishakapatnam-based activist.
In 1984,
Chakradhar had to file cases in the High Court to put pressure on the
administration to release land records of tribals in northern Andhra Pradesh.
“If we have
to knock on the doors of the higher courts for small things, imagine the
backlog in an already overburdened court,” he said.
The
amendment, according to him, will reduce the worth of the State Information
Commission and therefore force the information seeker to approach the court
more often.
In 2016, the
Central Information Commission had declared that they did not have the time to
answer all the RTIs that were filed.
Second Appeal
The
information one gets in the first appeal is usually of the non-controversial
nature, said Jangid. Any information that rattles the power that be is denied
and we have to appeal to the state information commission, he said. If the
State Information Commission is in the pockets of the Centre, how will we
function, he asked.
The RTI Act
remains unamended since the beginning. Subsequent amendments to the law have
been opposed by the civil society and governments have been forced to withdraw
them.
Notably, in
2012, when the government proposed to allow the withdrawal of appeal or
dropping the application if the applicant died. Given the dozens of deaths of
RTI activists across the state, this amendment was opposed vehemently.
“If the
government want to make the law better, they should ensure that the Commissions
function better than they do,” said Shivhare.
Since a bulk
of the recruits are former bureaucrats who come with a mindset to withhold
information, their natural response is to deny information, she said.
“So, more of
often than not, we rely on the integrity of individual information officers to
get work done,” she said.
In such a
situation, it would be a death blow to the entire transparency ecosystem to
change the salaries of the information officers, said Nayak.
Currently,
the salary of the chief of the Central Information Commission are the same as
that of the chief election commissioner. Similarly, that of the central
information commissioners and state chief commissioners, are on a par with
election commissioners.
Government
notice in July 2018 tries to make a distinction between the Election Commision
and the Information Commission. EC, it says, is a constitutional body
established by clause (1) of Article 324 of the Constitution, while the CIC and
state information commissions are statutory bodies established under the
provisions of the RTI Act, 2005. Therefore, the salaries cannot be on par, it
argues.
“The reason
why the judges and the election commissioners carry any weight is because their
salaries are not something the government can meddle with,” said Nayak.
Activists
Anjali Bharadwaj and Amrita Johri from the National Campaign for People’s Right
To Information argue that the “proposed amendments were not placed in the
public domain prior to being listed in Parliament. This precluded any
possibility of citizens expressing their views, suggestions and concerns about
the contents of the Bill.”
The
government’s desire to weaken the RTI Act does not surprise Jangid one bit.
“It is in
keeping with the larger attempt to cultivate a meek civil society and crush
people’s movements,” he said.
(Raksha Kumar
is a multimedia journalist focusing on human rights, politics and social
injustices. She tweets on @Raksha_Kumar)
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