RIGHTS: Public’s Right to Information, a New Reality in India

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, May 17 2005 (IPS) - For rights campaigner Parth J. Shah, the fact that the Right to Information Bill passed last week is yet unavailable online speaks volumes for India’s culture of obscuring if not denying information to the public.

Shah, who heads the Centre for Civil Society (CCS), one of several voluntary agencies that played a key role in compelling the government to pass the long-delayed bill last Wednesday, points out to the lack of clauses stipulating the government’s duty to publish legislation once they had been passed by both houses of Parliament.

”It is ironical that one may have to file a request to view the Right to Information Bill itself,” Shah told IPS in an interview.

The new law, he said, has glaringly left out provisions for the automatic publishing of important items like public and utility contracts, disaster management projects and official travel expenses – all of which have lately come under public scrutiny as result of media intervention.

Berlin-based Transparency International ranks India as one of the most corrupt countries in the world at 90th, out of 145 countries, in 2004. It said bureaucrats in India regularly take kickbacks in awarding government contracts and ask for bribes in return for services which citizens are fully entitled to.

Shah also thought the penalties for non-compliance, which are restricted to fines rather than jail sentences, were not harsh enough.

It is the fear of imprisonment that would get officials to see merit in sharing information with the public, he said.

The activist sees the continuing reluctance to part with information to the public as a legacy of the 1935 Official Secrets Act (OSA) introduced by the then British colonial government and perpetuated after independence in 1947 by its Indian successors.

”The tendency for the average bureaucrat or politician, once within the system, is to try and protect it since it works so eminently in the interests of insiders and prevents the empowerment of those outside,” said Shah.

Nonetheless, the bill seeks to arrest such tendencies by ensuring that its provisions are implemented by a body composed of people drawn not only from the bureaucracy but also from civil society and public life.

Overall the bill is in keeping with the global freedom of information movement that has seen similar laws enacted in no less than 50 countries around the world, encouraged by the U.N.’s initiatives on better governance.

The Indian law comes at time when there are concerns that economic liberalization has not been matched by the creaky working of a colonial-style bureaucracy – one which has taken shelter behind archaic secrecy laws to protect itself form charges of non-performance and, worse, innumerable charges of high corruption.

For example, Gautam Goswami, a bureaucrat hailed by ‘Time’ magazine as an Asian economic hero in October last year is now in the docks on charges of having presided over the siphoning away of five million U.S. dollars that were supposed to have gone into relief work for flood victims in eastern Bihar state.

Another high official in the eye of a storm is Justice S. N. Phukan who while heading a commission probing shady deals entered into by former defence minister George Fernandes, decided to use air force aircraft and other facilities to take his family on a holiday that cost the public exchequer a cool 250,000 dollars.

Unfortunately for Phukan, the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led government, of which he was a part, lost the national elections in May last year, just four months after he and his family took the now famous defence services guided-tour, visiting tourist spots and casting doubts on the impartiality of any report he would be making on army purchases.

Last week, Phukan’s findings, in which he exonerated Fernandes, were tabled in Parliament and unsurprisingly the Congress party-led government, which took charge last May, rejected it.

What is pertinent say activists like Shah is that while the ruling Congress party has a stake in embarrassing its political opponents like the BJP, the Indian public still seems to be left out from the right to know.

Even the new Right to Information Bill has inadequate provision to make publicly known the travel expenses of high ranking officials.

Until now the best demonstration of how the right to information can work to get ordinary citizens what is due to them is in the western state of Rajasthan, through the efforts of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sanghatan (Workers and Farmers Empowerment Organisation) founded by Aruna Roy, winner of the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership and International Understanding in 2000.

Roy, who resigned in disgust from India’s elitist and often corrupt bureaucracy, started working with illiterate villagers in Rajasthan as part of her fight for people to have the right to information. These Rajasthan villagers were duped by government officials out of wages for work they did in a famine alleviation scheme more than a decade ago.

Roy stepped in when she realized that most of the villagers believed that they had no right to demand to see government records of payments that were made only on paper and that for non-existent projects.

The organisation began its work by encouraging a worker in Rajasthan’s Pali district to claim wages due to him and then backing him to the hilt. This effectively countered government attempts to scuttle the ‘jan sunwai’ or public hearings organised by Roy and her colleagues.

The Rajasthan state government was compelled to come clean on the wage claims and even replace the money siphoned out of public coffers. The ‘jan sunwai’ sessions went on to become a revered institution in Rajasthan state.

”Actually we learned from the people rather than the other way around,” Roy, who must get the most credit for the safe passage of the Right to Information Bill, told IPS during a trip to the Indian capital last month.

”We learned the power of the open debate and what public humiliation can do to get officials to return to the people the proceeds of corruption,” she said.

But opacity and stone-walling tactics are still part and parcel of India’s bureaucracy. Many believe it will take some time and even a few convictions before the bureaucracy truly understands that the public has the right to information.

”Government officials will have to learn to accustom themselves to a new reality. They no longer have discretionary power over information; the government cannot treat people like children and withhold information from them…the citizens have a right to information,” said the influential ‘Indian Express’ in an editorial on May 13, two days after the bill’s passage.

”Lack of accountability was one of the prime instruments by which accountability was often fudged,” the ‘Indian Express’ went on to say indicating that a new era has dawned finally on India’s notoriously opaque government.