| Precisely to escape such a fate, the Right to Information Bill (RTI) became a law on October 12. But you may have noticed something strange going on. The government's attempt to implement the Act, its right-to-information machinery, is now evolving with a speed that would have driven George Orwell to new heights of bitter satire. |
| A ministry-like superstructure""the Central Information Commission""is being created to monitor the ministries of misinformation. A perfect case of why it needs a thief to catch a thief. |
| A Chief Information Commissioner has been appointed""the admirable Wajahat Habibullah, who recently retired from government with a sterling record of service. Under him are four information commissioners, three of them former bureaucrats: AN Tewari, secretary in the department of personnel and training, who will retire on December 1, and who has happily awarded himself, so to speak, a five-year sinecure""what could be more satiric than the personnel secretary being regarded the best in personnel for the job? |
| There's also OP Kejriwal, a former CEO of Prasar Bharti with some funny goings-on in the past, and Padma Subramanyan, an ex-secretary of the postal department. |
| These Mr Micawbers, gleefully rubbing their hands at new premises and new jobs (just when they thought they would be put to pasture), form only the peak of the pyramid. Below an imposing edifice of government, personnel will be coming up in the form of PIOs (public information officers). This body of men and women will be 75-strong to start with but will no doubt grow apace, each government department having the right to appoint as many as it thinks necessary. |
| As Orwell pointed out, among a bureaucracy's first tasks is to perpetuate itself""why not create a new bureaucracy under the pretext of fighting the old? |
| It is not just information-hungry journalists who shudder when they hear the words "Information Officer", recalling a particularly depressing form of rodent scuttling in dingy, foul-smelling ministry corridors, busily hiding information or mutating it into misinformation. Pity the poor public, now at the mercy of these recycled PIOs, to find out why their electricity bills are inflated or where the money for new roads and sewerage went. |
| Like a distasteful pill, the RTI bureaucracy comes sugar-coated with honeyed promises. There's a great deal of cool talk of user-friendly websites, applications to be received on e-mail, and even enforced penalties if proper information is not made available on time. |
| But anyone who has seen the inside of a government office knows all there is to know about its information-gathering, or, in fact, its information-tampering, system""those mountains of crumbling files, dirty metal cupboards, and desks spilling over with archaic or unattended paperwork. |
| One of the horrors of a filing and archiving system dating from the 1920s is that much of the time the government doesn't know what information it has or where it is stored, much less how it can be retrieved. |
| If Wajahat Habibullah and his cohorts doubt this, they can trot across to the parliament library and look at the records of the committee on parliamentary assurances""complete with details of how many questions by MPs were accurately or completely answered and how many remained incomplete, delayed, obfuscated or unanswered. |
| If the existing record of privileged information for Parliament is so awful, how will the RTI bureaucracy satisfy a vast information-hungry public, with a flood of complaints large and small? |
| In lieu of some straight answers, what the tax-paying public will certainly get is a spanking new administrative service""an ever-growing cadre of central information commission officers. The RTI is a handy new toy for some well-connected old boys. |
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