Reporting the RTI stuff

Book review of 'Journalism through RTI'

Journalism through RTI

Information, Investigation, Impact 

Shyamlal Yadav

Sage

220 pages; Rs 795

It was a small 300-word story that first appeared on the India Today website in December 2008 and then in the magazine in January 2009. It said: “5.91 crore LIC policies discontinued in seven years”. The story was based on a Right to Information or RTI application filed by Shyamlal Yadav, then with India Today. Life Insurance Corporation did not share how much money it gained as a result of these lapsed policies. However, within a month of the story, LIC launched a limited-edition scheme for lapsed policies to which 14,221 policy holders subscribed. 

This is the kind of bread-and-butter story that many newspapers, magazines, news channels ought to be doing, the kind India Today or The Indian Express did in the eighties and nineties — finding hidden agendas, uncovering inefficiencies in government, and misuse of public money and so on. Indian news channels have given up on reporting, but many newspapers, too, are geared to news that is dropped into in-trays by public relations people or through sources who have their own agendas. 

Journalism through RTI; Information, Investigation, Impact by Shyamlal Yadav, senior editor at The Indian Express takes you back to a zone where solid reporting matters: About how many foreign trips ministers make and how much taxpayer money it cost or how members of Parliament are appointing their relatives as personal assistants. Mr Yadav has used the RTI Act for over 10 years to unearth such stories. He has been feted across the world; UNESCO selected his work on India’s polluted rivers as one of the 20 best investigative stories globally. 

As you read the book you understand why. 

The book illuminates the whole point about freedom of information and how empowering legislation around it can be. Much of this forms the body of the very well-done first chapter “Advent of RTI and role of media”. For the uninitiated RTI is an “an ACT [sic] to provide for the setting up of the practical regime… for citizens to secure access to information under the control of public authorities in order to promote transparency and accountability…..” to quote from its preamble. This basically means any citizen can request any information from a public authority — the judiciary, bureaucracy, ministries, public sector companies, and so on. There is no format or form. All it needs is a plain sheet of paper, the query and your name, address et al. The processing fee is Rs 10 per application with extra charges for photocopying or providing the information on a disk or a storage device. There is a penalty if the public authority does not provide the information. 

Little wonder, then, that the legislation took over three decades to see the light — from the time the idea first came up in 1982 to 2005 when the Act was passed by the United Progressive Alliance. Mr Yadav’s account offers an insight into how closely information is guarded and the battles fought to bring it to us. He gives plenty of global perspective. Norway, The Netherlands, Canada and France among other countries allowed access to administrative documents from the sixties to the eighties. In South Asia, Pakistan was the first country that implemented a freedom of information ordinance in 2002. And, incidentally, to use the American Freedom of Information Act one need not be a citizen of that country, he says.

In most countries with freedom of information legislation, it is considered a good tool for investigative reporting too. This becomes a handy thing for citizens too, as the LIC story above illustrates. That is how almost all the big stories that Mr Yadav has done become case studies in this book. My favourite was the one on how bank officials, under pressure from political bosses, put one rupee or so in each of thousands of Jan Dhan accounts to reduce the number of zero-balance accounts.

Each of these stories took anywhere between two and 100 applications and two to 12 months each, not counting follow-up applications. Mr Yadav devotes many pages to telling you how to avoid the inevitable delays and obfuscation by officials hiding behind this clause or that and the usual “information not available,” responses. The last chapter gives 20 well-researched insights on how to make the best use of the RTI for investigative reporting. 

For all that, the RTI still isn’t widely used by journalists. That is the tragedy of Indian news media and also one of the shortcomings of the book. Though Mr Yadav’s reputation is formidable there must be other stories that have been broken by using the RTI. Even a couple would have added perspective, or some assessment on why there aren’t more RTI-based investigative stories. 

Mr Yadav also seems to focus on what the government is doing — ministers’ travels, foreign junkets and so on. However, some RTI investigation on how it is performing – on schemes or policies it has announced – would have been wonderful to read. For example, what has happened with Make in India or Digital India or Smart Cities? Such investigations offer richer fodder for public discourse.

These are, however, quibbles in a well-done book. If you are a journalist, editor, or someone who works in the news media, it is worth a read.