The Indian Express: New Delhi: Friday,
27 December 2024.
WHILE Manmohan Singh will be
remembered for many things, his lasting legacy as Prime Minister of India will
be implementation of the Right to Information (RTI) Act. His demise comes as
the RTI Act enters its 20th year of implementation, as a weapon in the hands of
ordinary citizens that no politician can take on publicly, even if they choose
to blunt it.
The RTI Bill was introduced in Parliament in December 2004, and was passed by the Lok Sabha on May 11, 2005, and by the Rajya Sabha the next day. During the debate on the legislation, Singh told the Lok Sabha: “The passage of this Bill will see the dawn of a new era in our processes of governance, an era of performance and efficiency, an era which will ensure that benefits of growth flow to all sections of our people, an era which will eliminate the scourge of corruption, an era which will bring the common man’s concern to the heart of all processes of governance, an era which will truly fulfill the hopes of the founding fathers of our Republic.”
The legislation was in fact first brought by Singh’s predecessor Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s government in 2002 as the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act. However, the Vajpayee government did not frame the rules for it, and hence the Act never got implemented.
When Singh took oath in 2004, he first considered framing rules for the same FOI Act. However, later a Bill was prepared to enact the RTI Act, which eventually came into implementation on October 12, 2005.
When it framed the RTI Act, India became one of the few countries to have such a legislation. While the first such law was implemented in Sweden in 1766, the US brought in one in 1966, while the UK enacted a law to this effect in 2005, like India. Since then, several countries have followed suit, with nearly 120 now boasting of similar legislation.
Soon after the RTI Act’s implementation, complaints poured in from government offices, of being deluged with applications. Though Singh never criticised the law as such, but at the Sixth Annual Conference of the Central Information Commission (CIC) in October 2011, he said: “A situation in which a public authority is flooded with requests for information having no bearing on public interest is something not desirable. We must, therefore, pool all our wisdom, our knowledge, and our experiences to come to a conclusion on how to deal with vexatious demands for information without, at the same time, hindering the flow of information to those whose demands genuinely serve public interest.”
Again next year, at the Annual CIC conference, he raised concerns about “frivolous and vexatious use of the Act in demanding information, the disclosure of which cannot possibly serve any public purpose”. “Sometimes information covering a long time-span or a large number of cases is sought in an omnibus manner with the objective of discovering an inconsistency or mistake which can be criticized. Such queries besides serving little productive social purpose are also a drain on the resources of the public authorities, diverting precious man-hours that could be put to better use.”
n 2010, during Singh’s second term as PM, his government exempted the CBI from the purview of the RTI.
However, on the whole, the UPA government remained proud of the legislation, with leaders from Sonia Gandhi to Rahul Gandhi citing it. Singh too remained convinced of its power, despite many alleged corruption scams under his second term being unearthed using the Act.
In bringing in the RTI, the Congress fulfilled a promise made in its 2004 election manifesto. When the UPA was constituted, its National Common Minimum Programme also talked about an RTI Act.
The RTI Bill was introduced in Parliament in December 2004, and was passed by the Lok Sabha on May 11, 2005, and by the Rajya Sabha the next day. During the debate on the legislation, Singh told the Lok Sabha: “The passage of this Bill will see the dawn of a new era in our processes of governance, an era of performance and efficiency, an era which will ensure that benefits of growth flow to all sections of our people, an era which will eliminate the scourge of corruption, an era which will bring the common man’s concern to the heart of all processes of governance, an era which will truly fulfill the hopes of the founding fathers of our Republic.”
The legislation was in fact first brought by Singh’s predecessor Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s government in 2002 as the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act. However, the Vajpayee government did not frame the rules for it, and hence the Act never got implemented.
When Singh took oath in 2004, he first considered framing rules for the same FOI Act. However, later a Bill was prepared to enact the RTI Act, which eventually came into implementation on October 12, 2005.
When it framed the RTI Act, India became one of the few countries to have such a legislation. While the first such law was implemented in Sweden in 1766, the US brought in one in 1966, while the UK enacted a law to this effect in 2005, like India. Since then, several countries have followed suit, with nearly 120 now boasting of similar legislation.
Soon after the RTI Act’s implementation, complaints poured in from government offices, of being deluged with applications. Though Singh never criticised the law as such, but at the Sixth Annual Conference of the Central Information Commission (CIC) in October 2011, he said: “A situation in which a public authority is flooded with requests for information having no bearing on public interest is something not desirable. We must, therefore, pool all our wisdom, our knowledge, and our experiences to come to a conclusion on how to deal with vexatious demands for information without, at the same time, hindering the flow of information to those whose demands genuinely serve public interest.”
Again next year, at the Annual CIC conference, he raised concerns about “frivolous and vexatious use of the Act in demanding information, the disclosure of which cannot possibly serve any public purpose”. “Sometimes information covering a long time-span or a large number of cases is sought in an omnibus manner with the objective of discovering an inconsistency or mistake which can be criticized. Such queries besides serving little productive social purpose are also a drain on the resources of the public authorities, diverting precious man-hours that could be put to better use.”
n 2010, during Singh’s second term as PM, his government exempted the CBI from the purview of the RTI.
However, on the whole, the UPA government remained proud of the legislation, with leaders from Sonia Gandhi to Rahul Gandhi citing it. Singh too remained convinced of its power, despite many alleged corruption scams under his second term being unearthed using the Act.
In bringing in the RTI, the Congress fulfilled a promise made in its 2004 election manifesto. When the UPA was constituted, its National Common Minimum Programme also talked about an RTI Act.
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