India Today: New Delhi: Sunday, August 12, 2018.
The freedom
to question the government about its actions is the hallmark of a democracy.
The Right to Information Act, passed in 2005, guarantees the citizens of India
the right to question their government, and ensures that people no longer have
to rely solely on elections to hold public functionaries accountable.
Every year,
nearly 6 million information applications are filed across the country, making
the RTI Act the most extensively used transparency legislation globally.
National assessments have shown that a large proportion of these applications
are filed by the poorest and the most marginalised. This is perhaps because
they have understood the tremendous potential of the RTI law to empower them to
access their basic rights and entitlements, especially in the absence of
effective grievance redress mechanisms to address service delivery failures.
For instance, when denied their share of subsidised rations on the pretext that
the government was not supplying foodgrains to ration shops, residents of slum
settlements in Delhi used the RTI Act to access the monthly stock registers of
their shops. The records exposed rampant corruption in the public distribution
system and were successfully used by people to hold officials accountable to
ensure proper delivery of rations. The law has similarly been used by people to
ensure delivery of minimum wages, pensions, healthcare, education, water supply
and sanitation.
The RTI Act
has initiated the vital task of redistributing power in a democratic framework
and transforming the relationship between citizens and the government. People
are using the law to question the highest offices of the country on their
performance, their decisions, and even their conduct. Information has been
sought regarding the educational qualifications of the prime minister and the
expenditure incurred on his foreign travels, regarding assets of the Supreme
Court judges and names of corporate loan defaulters of public sector banks.
The
transparency law has been instrumental in unearthing mega corruption scandals
like the Vyapam scam and the Adarsh scam. Human rights excesses, including
encounter killings and enforced disappearances, have been questioned. More
recently, information accessed under the RTI Act has been used to expose
fallacious claims made by public functionaries. When the PM and the HRD minister
claimed savings worth thousands of crores of rupees due to Aadhaar it was
stated that 40 million bogus ration cards and 80,000 bogus university teachers
were detected due to Aadhaar -- their assertions were queried. Unable to
provide any evidence, the state swung into damage control mode, issuing
clarifications and even rectifying parliamentary proceedings. Similarly, claims
of demonetisation being a resounding success could not stand up to
interrogation by RTI users.
INSTRUMENT
OF POWER
The power of
the RTI Act can also be gauged by the great lengths to which institutions have
gone to shield themselves from scrutiny under the law. In an unprecedented
move, the Supreme Court in March 2010 appealed before itself, challenging the
judgment of the Delhi High Court directing in response to an RTI application the
disclosure of asset-related information of judges of the apex court. The matter
is still pending!
By giving
every citizen of India the right to access government files and records, the RTI
Act has created an army of 1.3 billion potential whistleblowers and auditors
roles traditionally played by officials working within the government. It is no
surprise, therefore, that those who have used the law to show truth to power
have often had to pay a heavy price.
Scores of
citizens across the country have been threatened, attacked and at least 70 have
been murdered for using the law to access information exposing corruption and
abuse of power. Nandi Singh was hacked to death in Assam for using the RTI Act
to expose corruption in the public distribution system. In October 2016,
Bhupendra Vira was shot at point-blank range in his home in Mumbai for
accessing information to file complaints implicating the powerful land mafia.
The backlash
has not been limited to attacks on users of the law. The legislation itself has
not been spared. There have been several attempts by successive governments to
denigrate the sunshine law the first within one year of its enactment. The
government wanted to remove file notings from the ambit of the law in order to
prevent citizens from accessing information related to the decision-making
process.
In 2013, when
six national political parties were declared public authorities under the RTI
Act, they came together, in a rare show of solidarity, to move an amendment
bill in Parliament to exempt themselves from being answerable under the law.
The latest
attempt to subvert peoples right to information is the government's decision to
sneakily list in Parliament an RTI Amendment Bill, in complete contravention of
the principles of pre-legislative consultation. Through the proposed
amendments, the government seeks to centrally control peoples ability to access
information by undermining the autonomy of information commissions.
The RTI law
fixes the tenure of information commissioners at five years, subject to the
retirement age of 65 years. The salaries of the chiefs of information
commissions and the central information commissioners are effectively on par
with those of judges of the Supreme Court, and decided by Parliament. The fixed
tenure and the exalted status conferred on commissioners under the RTI Act is
to empower them to carry out their functions autonomously and direct even the
highest offices to comply with the provisions of the law.
The RTI
Amendment Bill, 2018, seeks to empower the central government to decide the
tenure and salaries of all information commissioners in the country. The move
will make commissions function like government departments by potentially
making commissioners compliant with the wishes of the government at the Centre,
lest their tenures or salaries are adversely impacted.
The proposed
amendments come in the backdrop of the BJP governments adamant inaction on
filling vacancies in the Central Information Commission (CIC). Since May 2014,
not a single commissioner of the CIC has been appointed without citizens having
to approach courts. Out of a total sanctioned strength of 11 commissioners,
there are currently four vacancies; four more, including the post of Chief
Information Commissioner, will become due this year. The failure to make timely
appointments is leading to huge backlogs of appeals and complaints, resulting
in inordinate delays in the commission, which render the law meaningless for
citizens.
It is a
testimony to the power and relevance of the RTI law that people have
persistently protected it from any attempts at dilution. Each move to amend the
law has been met with tremendous public resistance - -- people from all walks
of life have come together to save their right to information, which has been
upheld as a fundamental right by the Supreme Court. Even this time, public
opposition to the RTI Amendment Bill forced the government to defer its
introduction in Parliament, at least for the moment.
Any
government serious about fighting corruption and delivering good governance
must necessarily strengthen the RTI regime, which provides a decentralised
framework for citizens to expose corruption and abuse of power. In addition,
forward linkages need to be forged -- an effective anti-corruption and
grievance-redress framework needs to be set up, so that exposure achieved
through the use of the RTI Act can be converted into deterrent action against
those responsible. Unfortunately, key elements of this accountability framework
-- the Lokpal law and the Whistleblower Protection Act -- enacted over four
years ago, await implementation. The Grievance Redress Bill, aimed at providing
a time-bound mechanism for looking into complaints of service delivery, which
lapsed with the dissolution of the last Lok Sabha, is yet to be revived.
Statistical
and anecdotal evidence indicates that the RTI Act, considered one of the most
progressive pieces of information-access legislation in the world, has
successfully initiated the process of infusing transparency and accountability
in government functioning. It is only when an effective accountability
framework is operationalised that we, the people of India, will reap the
systemic and permanent gains of our transparency law.
(Anjali
Bhardwaj is Co-convenor of the National Campaign for Peoples Right to
Information)
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