Now shape the law

It’s easy for cynical journalists and weary citizens to scoff at the utility of the newly legislated Right to Information Act (RTI), and to say we-told-you-so when it doesn’t deliver anything meaningful a year or two from now, but the onus of ensuring the law works really rests with civil society. The government has done its bit by enacting the law, and it is obvious from a series of reports in this newspaper that the law has some shortcomings as well as grey areas. For instance, the fact that the government has omitted file notings from the purview of what the citizen has the right to know is a big negative since, in the case of complicated agreements with the government, it is file notings that provide the first hint of wrongdoing—more importantly, they tell you at whose instance this happened. But, if citizens can make a case to show that there is a prima facie case of corruption/nepotism, preferably through a court of law if the RTI officials refuse to part with information, then pressure gets built on the government to rethink this clause—indeed, when the government did a volte face and allowed the WLL-technology telecom players backdoor entry into the mobile market, the cellular operators almost got the Supreme Court to make the file notings public on precisely these grounds.

Similarly, there is some ambiguity as to who will actually be responsible for not giving information to the public—if you’re looking for information on whether the newly-constructed stretches of the NHAI are up to the mark, is the head of the NHAI responsible for giving this or is it the local district authorities? Also, can you just sit in Delhi (or email a query to the NHAI) and ask the NHAI for this, or do you have to go to each district? Again, it is only after citizens or activist groups begin to ask for such data and find the procedure tortuous that anyone can begin a campaign for a change in the law. The most interesting part of the law, of course, is the issue of suo motu declarations that will have to be made by each ministry/department. So, if one were to keep a watch on what kind of information was being made public by various ministries, and make good use of the data being provided, say, on the effectiveness of public education programmes, there could then be pressure put to ensure that each department evaluated programmes in much the same way and presented their results in a similar format.

Right now, personal information such as income tax returns and the annual confidential records of bureaucrats fall in the category of not-for-public-use, but if the courts rule that some of this has to be in the public domain after certain prima facie evidence is provided, such records could well come into the public domain. So far, based on Delhi’s experience with the Right to Information Act for over three years now, very few are making intelligent use of this powerful legislative tool. Indeed, an analysis of the RTI requests in Delhi shows that there were a large number of requests on who owned property, because those buying property felt this was a handy tool to get the information they required. A very large number of requests, in Delhi again, were to find out which posts were vacant in different departments. If something similar happens with the national RTI Act, citizens will be more to blame than the government.