How to make the Right to Information more meaningful

The other day, a leading NGO – Public Affairs Centre which works on issues of governance reform. organised a workshop on the Right to Information. The workshop which was aimed at analysing the implementation of the Right to Information in Bangalore, saw a group of young students present the findings of their study which analysed the working of the Right to Information Act across forty one government agencies. The meet also had a second part to it, where the Chief Information Commissioner of Karnataka state – Mr. K.K. Mishra gave a talk on where the implementation Right to Information Act should be headed.

The findings of the study revealed that

- A very few number of Public Information Officers were aware about the implementation of the Act.

- Another finding was that 37% of the respondents – PIOs and the department staff whom the students obtained information from, said that obtaining information which has been asked for under RTI applications, took away time that they spent on their primary work areas.

- The study also revealed that 10-15% of the respondents maintained computerised database of the RTI applications

- There was quite a few instances where information which was more than 6 years old was not available.

The Chief Information Commissioner for his part said that citizens should not be made to ask for information which are in fact their entitlements. He said that the process and the infomation which has been obtained should be documented so that citizens can access information easily. He said that suo – moto (voluntary) disclosures which were part of the Act must be actively encouraged. He gave the example of the US where citizens had to just make a call over a phone to get whatever information they wanted.

The findings of the study and the talk by the CIC, have some very interesting pointers.

More and more people are using the Right to Information, and they are doing this because they find that the information procured from this Act has a very direct and powerful bearing on their development prospects. However as more applications are received, the present system which requires an applicant to physically submit the application and the concerned officer to go through to spend considerable time processing these applications, undergoes tremendous strain. The system calls on citizens to reveal their identity and potentially exposing themselves to errant government officials against whom a certain application may have been filed. It also demands that government officials spend their time looking for the information which citizens want , at the cost of doing their primary job for which they are there in the first place ( which is why 37% of the respondents who were part of the study said that the act had a very direct and negative affect on their primary job).

The CIC is very right when he says that citizens should not be made to ask for information, it is their entitlement and such information should be there in the public domain for them to see.

While suo-moto disclosures are indeed welcome, to expect the entire government machinery to come forward and make voluntary disclosures would be expecting a bit too much. There might be individual cases where voluntary disclosures might happen, but mostly what is seen is government functionaries and personnel not disclosing information especially in rural areas because it would directly implicate them. Thus what is required is mandatory disclosures which make it binding on the government to publicly make avaiable any and all kinds of information which may be required by citizens, with the widest possible interpretation.

With regards to the medium, one of the many ways which would allow for citizens to access information real-time and that too directly without going through any intermediary was by putting this information on the Internet. This coupled with the fact that the government is establishing Internet Centres throughout India would allow a massive roll-out of the RTI in it's truest sense and also make the Internet more meaningful to citizens.