What do the corrupt care for small penalties when hundreds of crores of rupees have become the norm in taking bribes! What will the RTI achieve if Governments adopt a lackadaisical approach
To twist an old saying: The Right to Information is dead; long live the Right to Information. The Right to Information Act is an Act of Parliament “to provide for setting out the practical regime of right to information for citizens”, and replaces the erstwhile Freedom of Information Act, 2002. The Act applies to all States and Union Territories of India except Jammu & Kashmir. Under the provisions of the Act, any citizen may request information from a “public authority” (a body of Government or “instrumentality of State”) which is required to reply expeditiously or within 30 days. The Act also requires public authorities to computerise their records for wide dissemination and be pro-active in certain categories, so that the citizens need minimum recourse to request for information formally.
This law was passed by Parliament on June 15, 2005, and came into force on October 12, 2005. The idea of the Act was to bring transparency in administration. In a broad sense, transparency is about how much access to internally-held information citizens are entitled to; the scope, accuracy and timeliness of this information; and what citizens (as ‘outsiders’) can do if ‘insiders’ are not sufficiently forthcoming in providing such access.
Excessive secrecy can undermine the quality of public decision-making and prevent citizens from checking the abuses of public power. This can have a corrosive effect on virtually all aspects of society and governance. Transparency — in terms of both information disclosure and dissemination and access to decision-making — is therefore very important.
The absence of, or inaccessibility to, information often creates a sense of disempowerment, mistrust and frustration. More laws, more regulators, most of them toothless, do nothing for better governance. More committees and more commissions in means added mess and confusion, as one often overlaps the other.
India is currently witness to tired or retired bureaucrats’ control. Serving or retired bureaucrats have engineered a takeover of virtually every important decision-making body. Of the 12 economic regulators created since liberalisation, nine are headed by retired bureaucrats. The appointments to constitutional bodies like the Comptroller and Auditor-General, the Central Vigilance Commission or the Reserve Bank of India come from their ranks, with few exceptions here and there. In 20 States, First Chief Information Commissioner were former Chief Secretaries The human rights commissions, SC and ST commissions and finance commissions, and even bodies like the National Disaster Management Authority or the Union Service Public Commission are often manned by retired bureaucrats.
The Competition Commission of India, a new regulatory body which was to supervise competitive practices, was instituted in 2003. A technocrat was apparently considered for the job but a retired Commerce Secretary was picked up instead. The appointment was challenged in a Public Interest litigation filed by an advocate who argued that a bureaucrat could not preside over a quasi-judicial body. Then Chief Justice VN Khare was quoted as saying, “At this rate, a day would come, maybe after 20 years, when the 26 judges of the apex court would be replaced by bureaucrats.”
So far as the Right to Information Act is concerned, the maximum penalty is Rs250 per day and the upper limit is Rs25,000 for not providing information without tenable reason in the time-frame established. But what do the corrupt care for such small penalties when hundreds of crores of rupees have become the norm in taking bribes, both by bureaucrats and corrupt leaders! The Government is going through the motions of transparency, but is actually following the policy of ‘willing to strike but afraid to wound’. What will the Right to Information achieve if the Government adopts not only a lackadaisical approach, but a clearly negative attitude in fighting corruptionIJ
Take the post-election scenario of the most prosperous State in the country — Maharashtra. A former Chief Minister made known before the Assembly election in October, 2014, his desire to crack down on corruption. Now it has become public knowledge that his Government sat quietly on 76 cases of graft, mostly against its own senior officials, breaching its own deadline and delaying permission for investigators to initiate action. The beneficiaries of this silence include former Ministers, legislators and high-ranking bureaucrats. According to rules formulated in February, 2014, following a Supreme Court directive, when a State Government is approached by its Anti-Corruption Bureau for permission to proceed with an ‘open inquiry’, it has to give the green signal within three months. The Government must follow a similar deadline when it comes to seeking permission to prosecute and file charge-sheets.
Out of the 76 cases mentioned earlier, the ACB had sought permission to prosecute top functionaries in 44 cases; initiate open inquiries in 13 cases; and review the Government’s decision not to move ahead in the remaining 19 cases. The State Home Department gave its nod for an ‘open inquiry’ in October, but a final Government sanction is still awaited.
Though the law requires that Information Commissioners should be persons of eminence, the last Haryana Government, just before losing the election, in a hurry made appointments to the State Information Commission. One of them included the Chief Secretary of Haryana who was retiring on July 31, 2014, as well as the wife of the Advisor to the then Chief Minister.
At present, 66,000 RTI complaints are pending before the Central Information Commission. A vast majority of Information Commissioners are retired civil servants. Approximately 69 per cent of CICs are retired IAS officers. The following is the work done by them, which speaks for itself.
The collective backlog in 23 commissions in the country is about 1.98 lakh as on December 31, 2013. The maximum number of appeals and complaints were pending in Uttar Pradesh (48,442), Maharashtra (32,390) and the Central Information Commission (26,115). The massive backlog in disposal of appeals and complaints in the Information Commissions, nullifies the Act, which needs to be removed from the statute book. A report titled, ‘People’s Monitoring of the RTI Regime in India 2011-2013’, said that the regime might as well as dump laws like the RTI, which serve no purpose, except to give jobs to the retired bureaucrats.
Ronald Reagan once rightly said that “no Government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programmes, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a Government bureaucrat is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.” let us hope that the present Union Government will prove the former US President wrong.