Some of the new rules may threaten the efficacy of the RTI regime, writes Pankaj KP Shreyaskar
The Right to Information Act, when it arrived in 2005, was worth celebrating. It became the talk of the town overnight. It also made quick impact in almost all walks of governance — from stock exchanges to science and technology, from power distribution companies to defence sales, from the Henderson Brooks-Bhagat report to the Volcker Committee report, from Padma awards to Prime Ministers’ foreign visits.
Every year, since 2005, the Central Information Commission has held a national conclave on October 12 — except for this year. This conclave has been accepted as one of the most reliable intellectual deliberations on the RTI and its outcomes have been accepted as relevant policy guidelines by the stakeholders.
The much celebrated conventions of the CIC have been attended by experts on RTI and Freedom of Information laws from across the globe including various Indian legal luminaries, political leaders and intellectuals.
The journey of the RTI until very recently was following the dictum of Hubert Humphrey, “Freedom is hammered out on the anvil of discussion, dissent, and debate”. The first and foremost visible trend in this regard is the pernicious influence of a handful of RTI activists on the system. They are consciously flooding RTI functionaries with applications, reminders, appeals, submissions and requests for compliance.
Consequently, RTI functionaries are forced to join the vicious cycle of sending letters on and on without releasing much information since the law do not have provisions for res judicata. In the process, they are exposed to the risk of their own follies and fall prey to the strategies of a handful of activists. A miniscule minority is holding the majority to ransom.
The growing number of pending appeals and complaints before the Commission is another area of serious concern. The official estimates, as available on the CIC website, alone indicates that there has been a sharp 68 per cent rise this September continued to September 2013. The information seeker has to wait for a decision for about 12 to 15 months. The stakeholders are exasperated with such delays, since the information sought by them is not an end in itself.
Much to the worries of the stakeholders, the CIC is conspicuously functioning without a Chief Information Commissioner since August 23, when Mr Rajiv Mathur, the sixth Chief IC demitted office. This is an unprecedented situation in the history of RTI Act in India.
The lackadaisical attitude regarding disclosure of suo motu information by public institutions is against the spirit of the law. The Government had directed public authorities to get their suo motu disclosure audited by a third party within six months and submit a compliance report to the Department of Personnel & Training and the CIC in April 2013. Till date, no audit reports are being sent by the public authorities.
On September 22, the DoPT urged public authorities to ensure compliance of the guidelines at the earliest. Any detailed guideline regarding the audit parameters and the selection of third party auditor, however, is left to the imagination of the public authorities. The guideline has its own limitations but the compliance would have certainly strengthened the advocacy of the social audit of information, as held and maintained by public institutions in India.
Many instances keep flashing intermittently through various judicial interpretations which leave the stakeholders flabbergasted. The judgement of the Supreme Court in the matter of the Chief IC and the State of Manipur and another has inter alia interpreted that the procedure of filing appeals and complaints before the Commission are separate and independent, and that while dealing with the complaint, the Commissions can only impose penalty and not direct for disclosure of information.
Whereas, the judgement aptly presents the scheme of the RTI Act, its application in practice makes throws various challenges. For example, if a complaint is filed for paying an unreasonable fee under Section 18(1)(d), and if the Commissions can impose only penalty in terms of Section 20 of the Act, no such penalty can be imposed as the demand for an unreasonable fee is not the ground for imposing penalty in Section 20 of the RTI Act.
In a serious blow to the transparency regime in the country, the Madras High Court has recently said that RTI applicants must give reasons for seeking information, as it gave relief to its Registry from disclosing file notings on a complaint against a Chief Metropolitan Magistrate.
However, the law itself does not require specifying any such reasons while seeking information under the RTI Act. This direction of the court has evoked several debates.
If the information seeker has to give reasons for seeking information, it is highly likely that the application will be opposed by the public institutions at the level of admission itself. Further, for the sake of argument, if it is argued that the information seeker mentions the reasons for seeking information, neither the law nor the rules made thereunder provides for establishing the veracity of the reasons so presented by the applicant.
I am a short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist for the future of RTI in India. Be as it may be, the law should be left to progress on its path for some more time, so as to let the outcome shine drip by drip. let the good sense prevail in protecting such a wonderful law so that the RTI Act does not become yet another archaic law in such a short span of its life cycle.