The Wire: New Delhi: Wednesday, 23 August 2023.
Right to Information activists confirm that years of data has gone missing from the Union government’s portal. The site has processed 58.3 lakh applications since 2013.
In what is a further shrinking in the ability of the Right to Information (RTI) to be used to nurture a climate of information, access and transparency in the country, The Hindu reports that records of lakhs of previous RTI applications have vanished from the Union government’s RTIOnline portal. An activist confirmed to The Wire that this amounts to “removing government orders.”
RTIOnline is the platform through which citizens can file for access to public information and record from the Union government. According to The Hindu, it has “viewed and verified samples of applications from two RTI activists, one of whom has had their entire account purged of information from before 2022.”
Chandra Shekhar Gaur, an RTI activist from Madhya Pradesh, told the newspaper that there was “a mismatch of several hundreds in his account.”
Srinivas Kodali, a digital rights activist and columnist on digital issues for The Wire also confirmed the disappearance. He told The Wire, “The RTI Online portal was being turned unusual by the government for the past few months with them stopping new registrations and even warning of deleting accounts that are not being used. Now All the RTIs filed prior to 2019 have been deleted from the server.”
He added that this was as serious as removing government orders. “There was no official intimation about it to any of the RTI portal users,” he said.
The Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT), which administers the portal did not respond to a query from The Hindu on the missing data.
Another senior rights and transparency activist Anjali Bhardwaj told The Wire, “This is an extremely regressive move. All RTIs and replies should have, in fact, been made public, as also mandated by the DoPT. It might be useful to understand if they have been deleted permanently or they are no longer accessible on the portal.”
The scale of the deletion on the portal “may be staggering” says The Hindu. It calculates that “the RTIOnline portal has processed over 58.3 lakh applications from 2013, when it was launched, to 2022. The number of applications filed has been growing steadily, with over 12.6 lakh applications filed in 2022.”
The report says that the site had been behaving sub-optimally and poorly in the past few weeks. The portal has “at least two periods of multiple days… lagged in speed and performance, and applications were not filed with authorities until days after users made a payment.”
The Right to Information Act, 2005 was a landmark law in India that empowered a citizen’s ability to demand public information and inverted the relationship of staid bureaucracies and opaque governments, opening them up to scrutiny. But ever since 2014, the ability to get information through applications, or in appeal, has been hampered by an air of unwillingness in the ruling establishment and often the non-appointment of Information Commissioners for years.
The passage of the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill in the last session of parliament will amount to amending the RTI Act through the backdoor, experts have said. The Bill has since been signed into law. Earlier, “the larger public interest” justified the disclosure of personal information. Now, the new data Bill prohibits government agencies from sharing private information of any kind, regardless of the public interest it may entail.
Right to Information activists confirm that years of data has gone missing from the Union government’s portal. The site has processed 58.3 lakh applications since 2013.
In what is a further shrinking in the ability of the Right to Information (RTI) to be used to nurture a climate of information, access and transparency in the country, The Hindu reports that records of lakhs of previous RTI applications have vanished from the Union government’s RTIOnline portal. An activist confirmed to The Wire that this amounts to “removing government orders.”
RTIOnline is the platform through which citizens can file for access to public information and record from the Union government. According to The Hindu, it has “viewed and verified samples of applications from two RTI activists, one of whom has had their entire account purged of information from before 2022.”
Chandra Shekhar Gaur, an RTI activist from Madhya Pradesh, told the newspaper that there was “a mismatch of several hundreds in his account.”
Srinivas Kodali, a digital rights activist and columnist on digital issues for The Wire also confirmed the disappearance. He told The Wire, “The RTI Online portal was being turned unusual by the government for the past few months with them stopping new registrations and even warning of deleting accounts that are not being used. Now All the RTIs filed prior to 2019 have been deleted from the server.”
He added that this was as serious as removing government orders. “There was no official intimation about it to any of the RTI portal users,” he said.
The Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT), which administers the portal did not respond to a query from The Hindu on the missing data.
Another senior rights and transparency activist Anjali Bhardwaj told The Wire, “This is an extremely regressive move. All RTIs and replies should have, in fact, been made public, as also mandated by the DoPT. It might be useful to understand if they have been deleted permanently or they are no longer accessible on the portal.”
The scale of the deletion on the portal “may be staggering” says The Hindu. It calculates that “the RTIOnline portal has processed over 58.3 lakh applications from 2013, when it was launched, to 2022. The number of applications filed has been growing steadily, with over 12.6 lakh applications filed in 2022.”
The report says that the site had been behaving sub-optimally and poorly in the past few weeks. The portal has “at least two periods of multiple days… lagged in speed and performance, and applications were not filed with authorities until days after users made a payment.”
The Right to Information Act, 2005 was a landmark law in India that empowered a citizen’s ability to demand public information and inverted the relationship of staid bureaucracies and opaque governments, opening them up to scrutiny. But ever since 2014, the ability to get information through applications, or in appeal, has been hampered by an air of unwillingness in the ruling establishment and often the non-appointment of Information Commissioners for years.
The passage of the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill in the last session of parliament will amount to amending the RTI Act through the backdoor, experts have said. The Bill has since been signed into law. Earlier, “the larger public interest” justified the disclosure of personal information. Now, the new data Bill prohibits government agencies from sharing private information of any kind, regardless of the public interest it may entail.
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