The RTI revolution has not yet lived up to its promise of making the state more transparent. Rrishi Raote on what’s going wrong.
In the village of Saldi, 13 km from Amreli in Gujarat, the two fair-price shops always seemed to be short of rations. Fed up, 18-year-old student Bhadresh Wamja filed an application in February 2011 with the tehsildar to find out what supplies were sent every month. After much resistance and some threats, an inspection of one shop was scheduled — but the shopkeeper quietly moved out the stock.
Wamja phoned an NGO in Ahmedabad, which advised him to file a right-to-information request with the deputy tehsildar and make a police complaint. He learnt that full supplies had been delivered. The tehsildar was forced to investigate again, and he found that nine out of 10 villagers had received nothing. Clearly, rations had been diverted. An adverse report was filed, an inquiry held, and the shopkeeper forced to mend his ways.
As a result of Wamja’s efforts, all fair-price shops in Gujarat, even though privately owned, are now required to disclose what supplies they receive. A campaign is under way to make sure that they do.
Six years after it was enacted, the Right to Information Act has given rise to a whole ecosystem inhabited by ordinary people, harassed officers, activists, companies and professionals. Good Samaritans hold RTI clinics across the country, help is on offer online, and there are NGOs that specialise in RTI. Companies have started using the Act to access policy documents. Journalists use it to get scoops on the government. And activists use it to devastating effect.
On September 21, when Subramanian Swamy brandished in the Supreme Court a note sent by the finance ministry to the prime minister’s office in March, which said that P Chidambaram (then finance minister) had allowed disgraced telecom minister
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A Raja to have his way while allotting 2G spectrum at a throwaway price in 2007-08, it was a document that RTI activist Vivek Garg had got from the PMO. The note sent the Manmohan Singh government into a tizzy, till Sonia Gandhi intervened and made peace between Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee and Chidambaram.
Threats are common to “troublesome” information-seekers and can even escalate to murder. Over a dozen RTI activists have been killed since 2005, the latest being Shahla Masood of Bhopal in August 2011. It is not always possible, however, to link the murder to RTI. On the flip side, some activists, it is said, blackmail businessmen or officials with the threat of exposure.
“Whatever information you get, put it in the public domain,” advises C J Karira, supermoderator of the online forum RTI-India.org (which has 160,000 members). “The problem with RTI activists is they want their name associated, so they don’t disclose information immediately. If it is put up then there is no point in killing you.” If 50 citizens all demand the same information, the wrongdoer cannot eliminate all 50.
Instances of blackmail or extortion are exaggerated, says Bhaskar Prabhu of the Mahiti Adhikar Manch, a group of 50 RTI activists in Mumbai that holds RTI “clinics” twice a month to help people write applications and understand the law. Only “15-20 per cent of Indians know what RTI is,” he says, “of which only 1 per cent are actually using it.” Slowly, via RTI and other measures (like e-governance) the government is beginning to turn toward transparency and accountability.
Harish V, an advocate and RTI activist in Kerala, focuses on environmental issues. Once he heard a rumour that the government was giving 1,000 acres of forest to a private company. He got the files, informed the local media, and the state backtracked. Was he never threatened? “I got two-three calls, saying ‘You don’t try this.’ That’s the usual thing in social work. Usually they will not go further than that — not like in north India.” This is why he has filed RTI requests from afar on behalf of activists in more dangerous areas like Assam, as well as for whistleblowers within the state administration or PSUs.
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Much of official India, from the prime minister down, has reservations about the way the RTI Act works. Public Information Officers (PIOs) are the first RTI point of contact in any branch of any public authority. There are hundreds of thousands of PIOs, and most handle RTI applications in addition to their regular duties. “Officials feel that RTI has given them only extra work,” says R Suresh, director of Public Affairs Centre, a Bangalore-based non-profit organisation. “Hence, they see any RTI application with some contempt and treat it as an intrusion.” And if an officer or department is corrupt, RTI makes it more difficult to continue with business as usual. Fortunately there are ways to keep applicants on the back foot.
An average of about 30 per cent of RTI applications are rejected, says Yamina Aiyar of the Centre for Policy Research. She helped lead a nationwide study in 2009 by the RTI Assessment & Analysis Group and the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information (NCPRI), the organisation which led the campaign for the RTI law in the 1990s. The study found that PIOs in rural areas often “harassed” or “discouraged” applicants. About 60 per cent of responses came late, although the law says information has to be given within 30 days. Yet only 1.4 per cent of delayed cases met with the statutory penalty. “Ours were fairly non-controversial queries,” says Aiyar. She adds that “You don’t always get all the information.” The PIO can choose to withhold some, although he must explain why, under Section 8 of the Act.
Section 8 offers a panoply of ways for an ignorant or ill-disposed PIO to reject an RTI application. Exemptions like legislative privilege, national interest, privacy, impeding an investigation or prosecution, Cabinet decisions and so on can be stretched to cover quite a few demands — even though the RTI Act makes clear that every citizen has a “right” to public information.
It’s not just the accusatory tone. “PIOs get complaints that are 15-16 pages long,” says Karnataka Information Commissioner J S Virupakshaiah, “with the actual question being just a few lines on the last page.” A new rule in Karnataka limits RTI queries to 150 words each, though activists say they will challenge this in court. What to do, however, if bureaucrats make crucial file-notings on removable Post-Its, or in different colours for coded messages?
Another way to sidestep RTI queries is to deny that one is a “public authority”. Schools, public-private partnerships, cricket’s BCCI and other organisations have tried to escape this category, only to come up against an order from the Information Commission. This, however, can be appealed — in court. Gandhi calls it a “dysfunctional judicial system” because, for instance, a “PPP will go to the High Court or Supreme Court and get a stay. It can take two decades,” by which time the RTI request is meaningless.
Delay is a fine tool of avoidance. It wreaks its worst damage in appeals — if a PIO rejects an application, the applicant can make a first appeal to his superior, and then a second appeal with the state or central information commission where there is a huge and growing backlog. There is no time limit for the second appeal. So it could take years.
In cases of “life and liberty” a quick reply is required by law. Harish V describes the case of a man who was arrested and vanished, but whose arrest was not recorded at the police station. The RTI request for papers was rejected, and the appeal, he was told, “the Commission will hear after one or two months. That person may have died or suffered custodial torture.”
Ordinary appeals could take years. Uttar Pradesh, with nine commissioners, has about 32,000 pending appeals. Maharashtra’s pendency has crossed 17,000. In New Delhi, Gandhi and his colleagues handle 20 or more appeals a day, yet pendency grew to 19,571 by July 2011. Chief Information Commissioner Satyananda Mishra refuses to speak with us because of the pressure of hearings.
In West Bengal the pendency period is 10.7 years. “The law has become defunct,” says activist Malay Bhattacharya. “There is no infrastructure in place. The state can have seven information commissioners. At present we have just two.” Understaffing is rife. In Karnataka, four of 10 seats are empty, and commissioner Virupakshaiah says 14,000 appeals are pending. Andhra Pradesh has had only one commissioner for a whole year, and pendency was 8,392 by May 2011.
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What’s more, “The quality of commissioners is very poor,” says Karira. Among the examples is H N Krishna of Karnataka who was forced to resign in September 2011 after being chargesheeted for fraud. Others include superannuated bureaucrats and washed-up politicians. Each commissioner costs the nation about Rs 25 lakh a year in salary and perks. In some states, Karira adds, “you have PIOs who don’t even have a typewriter. They have to write out responses by hand.” Also, “no one is trained in record-keeping.”
RTI fees vary and are not convenient to pay, though the Act explicitly says the poor must have access. In Karnataka, says R Suresh of the Public Affairs Centre, “the payment of fees has not yet been simplified. PIOs continue to demand drafts instead of giving a cash receipt to the RTI applicant.” Harish V says that in Kerala, information from a distant office can cost Rs 50 a page, instead of Rs 2. Having to go to a distant office cuts RTI appeals in rural Rajasthan very sharply, says Nikhil Dey of NCPRI.
Still, the number of activists is barely growing. “We RTI activists ourselves are to blame,” says Karira, “because we don’t guide users to become activists. We don’t collaborate much with each other.” It is only experience which shows “how to check whether documents are original or not, whether any documents have been removed from a file, and how to file a strong appeal”, he says.
Aiyar takes a longer view. “Ten years from now,” she says, “if people are still filing RTIs, that will be a serious state failure.” It will mean that transparent government still has not arrived.
(Indulekha Aravind in Bangalore, Shashikant Trivedi in Bhopal, Arghya Ganguly in Mumbai and Swati Garg in Kolkata contributed to this article.)