Does the RTI act?
- Most of the central and state commissions are filled with IAS and IPS retirees
- Bureaucrats impose hefty fees of up to Rs 1 lakh to give out information
- They dissuade applicants using technicalities and ‘losing’ the relevant files
- Authorities take legal recourse to stall applications under Act
- Some commissioners have rejected applications in more than 80% of the cases
Some Answers
Ministry / Requests Received / Requests Rejected
Finance / 4,770 / 37.6%
Urban Development / 2,504 / 6%
Communciations and Information Technology/ 1,722 / 7%
Home / 1,316 / 28.6%
First report card by the CIC on the performance of top ministries till March 2006
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Kheema Ram, an eighth-standard pass Dalit villager fromRajasthan, crisscrosses the state’s Rajsamand district each day to search for issues that are confronting the locals.
His mission is to ask relevant questions under the Right to Information (RTI) Act, and thus, empower the people. Before the law came into being, Ram’s requests for information from local authorities were always met with denials. Today, getting it has become de rigueur. Ram has moved more than 90 applications underRTI, of which 70 have fetched him satisfactory responses.
One such was in Nardas Ka Guda village. Workers there had not been paid their wages for building two rooms under theCentre-sponsored Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan scheme for six months. Thanks to Ram, a member of the Mazdoor Kisan ShaktiSanghatan, the villagers used the rti to question the authorities. They also demanded to see the muster roll. It revealed that the women were being paid only Rs 40 per day while the men got Rs 50. What was worse, both were being paid lower than the Rs 73 due to them per day. A complaint resulted in the villagers not only being compensated for the loss of pay, but to equal wages for men and women.
From the villages of Rajasthan to Mumbai, India’s financial centre, sleepy Aligarh to bustling Delhi, peripheral Andhra Pradesh to literateKerala, the RTI Act is ushering in a quiet revolution. Kheema Ram and his ilk are the new heroes questioning the establishment to better their lives and inculcate transparency within the state’s delivery mechanism. This is the modern face of India that’s putting the ‘forgotten’ onto the country’s socio-politico-economic map. This is probably as important as the trend of Indian businesses leaving their stamp on the global arena. Says chief information commissioner, implementing theRTI, Wajahat Habibullah, "The RTIAct has made the government answerable."
As per the Act, any person can file an application in either written or electronic form by paying a fee of Rs 10. The public information officer(PIO)—each department, public authorities and state-aided agencies must have at least one—receives the application and has to provide an answer within 30 days. If thePIO doesn’t, the applicant can appeal to a higher appellate authority of the same department. If this too fails, the applicant can knock at the doors of theCentral Information Commission (CIC), the final arbitrator for issues relating to central government. In case the issue pertains to a state government, the state information commission (SIC) will take up theredressal.
However, the RTI information highway is not without its roadblocks. Those who drafted the policy know the best way to dodge and bob, stall and side-step the demands for information, most of the time terming it sensitive. Initially, the bureaucrats tried to keep notings on government files out of the Act’s purview. A public outcry forced them to backtrack. (Ironically, the department of personnel and training, the nodal ministry behind the enactment of therti, still states on its website that notings on government files are exempt from disclosure.) But the babus found another way out—put veteran warhorses in charge of the Act. How else does one explain the presence of at least 30 formerIAS and IPS officials in the central and state information commissions? Four of the five commissioners with the central commission are ex-bureaucrats, and six former chief secretaries are state-level commissioners.
To dissuade information- seekers, the commissioners use the old and tested tactics. Take this example of Sharavan KumaraKushawa, a CPI(ML) activist, who asked for the muster rolls to track the progress of the national rural employment guarantee(NREG) scheme in the Chandouli district in western Uttar Pradesh. The panchayat of the district was more than willing to give the information, but at a whopping price. Kushawa was asked to deposit Rs 1 lakh for it, and another Rs 35,000 for the additional information he had asked for. This when theNREG Act mandates that the employment muster rolls must be available for public inspection and the guidelines are, in fact, more stringent than theRTI Act. There have been several other cases where the PIOs in the ministries or the state agencies impose irrational charges. Tariq Islam, a professor at the Aligarh Muslim University, who files several applications every day, was asked to pay Rs 3,290 and Rs 1,870 in two separate cases for getting details about the safety measures that the university has taken to tackle fires and provide first-aid on the campus.
Parivartan, an NGO that is trying to gauge the effectiveness of RTI, feels there are several cases of arbitrary decision-making. Agra resident Pramod Gupta’s application was rejected because it was "not in the correct format". When he filed it in the right format, it was rejected again—because he did not attach five copies. By the time Gupta attached the five copies, his application was rejected a third time—this time without any reason. Finally, his file was lost.
Many information commissioners are also unwilling to pass orders favouring the appellants. While Habibullah has denied information in nearly 38 per cent of the cases, information commissionerM.M. Ansari has done this in over 80 per cent. True, there’s a penalty of a fine of up to Rs 25,000 on officials denying information, but it has seldom been invoked. In the last two years, only 18 penalties have been imposed, and it’s been paid in only 12 cases. Many ministries and public authorities are also guilty of hiding information. Some of them have disregarded the clauses of Section 4(1) of the Act that require them to suo motu publish information on major decisions within 120 days.
If all else fails, there is always the legal route to take to stall progress on the information sought. The courts have stayed many landmark orders passed by the commissions. Hear this story of Mumbai resident Shailesh Gandhi, who has been giving Maharashtra’s transport minister, SurupsinhNaik, sleepless nights. Using RTI, Gandhi has been trying to get Naik’s medical records for the "chest pain" he suffered when he was sentenced to a one-month jail sentence by the Supreme Court for contempt of court last year. "I’ve wondered about the chest pains that politicians suffer from when they are sent to jail," says Gandhi.
But the concerned information officer refused to make them public and Gandhi went into an appeal. On March 5, 2007, the full bench of the Maharashtra’s sic judged that Naik’s records must be shared because the issue of public interest was at stake.Naik, of course, obtained a stay on the order from the Bombay High Court. However, last week, the high court vacated the stay.
Then there’s the case of Ramesh Chidambaram from Vellore. He wanted to know the contents of the correspondence between the President and the Prime Minister on the Justice Nanavati Commission, which is probing the role of the state government during the 2002 Gujarat riots. The government refused, saying it had the privilege to do so under the Indian Evidence Act, 1872. "But the provisions of theRTI Act have an overriding effect on other Acts, including the Indian Evidence Act. This is what prompted me to seek information about the correspondence underRTI," says Chidambaram. According to him, an information commissioner alleged he was ‘motivated’ to apply for the information. When Chidambaram hit roadblocks, he appealed to theCIC. "My case was the first one to be heard by a CIC’s full bench, which passed an order in favour of my application," he says. But soon after, the government obtained a stay against theCIC’s order from the Delhi High Court. That’s where Chidambaram’s case stands.
Ishaqe, a member of a Gujarat-based ngo, Nyayagrah, is facing similar problems in getting information for victims of the 2002 Gujarat riots. "WhileRTI has enabled us to get access to police firs and panchnamas, it is difficult to get the same information from the courts if the cases have gone to trial," he explains. Lawyer Vrinda Grover says human rights and human security issues should get paramount importance over national security as the importance of theRTI lies in these areas. Clearly, although the current government has endorsed theRTI Act, it has approached the courts to limit its implementation. The bureaucracy has mastered the subtle and not-so-subtle art of hiding information. For the common man, though, there’s still hope. "I think theRTI is very helpful but people do not know how to use it; and where it should be applied," saysIshaque. Perhaps, citizens will learn it quickly and discover its sting.
by Anuradha Raman and Saikat Datta
