Sri Lanka’s new Right to Information (RTI) Act could open new doors for the country’s media if journalists use it effectively. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
COLOMBO, Feb 15 2017 (IPS)

Sri Lanka’s long-awaited and much-debated Right to Information (RTI) Act became law this month without much fanfare.

There was no big PR campaign on the part of the government to unveil it on Feb. 3, a day before the island’s 69th Independence celebrations. There was not even a public event, a rarity in this South Asian island, where politicians are prone not to let such opportunities pass by.

Maybe the lack of fanfare was due to a rare understanding of what RTI could do to Sri Lanka’s governing culture – like media minister Gayantha Karunathilake predicted several months ago, the act now places all elected and public officials ‘inside a glass box’ of public scrutiny.

And the requests have flooded in. Taking the lead has been actor turned politician and current deputy minister of social welfare, Rajan Ramanayake. He filed a slew of requests even before the ink dried on the new act.

“This is an act will reveal everything about politicians, without any discrimination on party affiliations,” Ramanayake said.

His RTI requests include details on the number of bar permits, sand mining permits, duty free shop permits, fuel station permits and land permits that have been offered to elected officials from parliamentarians to those at local government bodies. He said he was likely to receive the details by the third week of February.

He has also filed a request for details of all licenses given out by the government to operate TV stations and their conditions.

Most of the first batch of RTI requests have been linked to corruption within public sector, according to RTIWire, a national website that tracks the progress of the act.

“When we asked the public what information they would seek through RTI, almost a third of them referenced some form of corruption by public servants; for example, asset declarations, irregularities in tenders, salaries and perks for ministers,” RTIWire said in profiling the first ten days of the new act.

Citizens in the former conflict zone in the North and East have used the act to seek information on land acquisitions by government departments and on missing loved ones.

Media Minister Karunathilake is candid about the act’s possible ramifications on the government ,which has stepped into the second of a five-year term.

“This will open up the government structure completely for scrutiny. Usually governments will take this kind of decision at the toe end of their terms, but we have not. The act can minimize corruption.”

There has been criticism leveled at the government that the act was aimed at soothing international concerns on rights issues, especially those stemming from the administrations of former president Mahinda Rajapaksa between 2005 to 2015.

The minister denied that there was any connection between the act and the government’s efforts to regain preferential tariff deals for garment exports to the European Union.

“There is no connection at all,” he said. In the next two months the EU is expected to announce whether Sri Lanka will be allowed back in to GSP+ tariff fold that it lost in 2010 due to rights-related concerns.

Opposition parties, however, say that the government is not showing the same enthusiasm it displayed in getting the act finally functioning in making sure the act is implemented efficiently.

“If they are serious, they should begin awareness campaigns without delay,” Opposition MP from the People’s Liberation Front Nalinda Jayatissa said.

To be fair, the government has a Herculean task on its hands in getting RTI information officers into all government agencies, which according to some estimates at the Media Ministry could be in the range of 40,000.

The Ministry has been training officers in the last few months, and while several thousand have taken up posts, many more remain to be filled. The government has not done itself any favours by only allocating a mere Rs 25 m (175,000 dollars) in the current budget for RTI implementation.

Close to two weeks after the act became law, the government was yet to announce the relevant officers in departments, adding confusion and creating unnecessary delays for those submitting requests. B.K.S. Ravindra, the additional secretary at the Media Ministry, said that list would soon be made available online, but did not give a date.

During the first week of the act, there was also confusion about whether police came under the act and who was the relevant officer for each station. Ravindra said that police stations indeed came within the act and that the Assistant Superintendent of Police from each district would serve as the RTI officer.

But according to RTIWire, “the Police are still in the process of appointing Information Officers. This should be complete within the next few weeks. The police force is currently participating in trainings held by the Ministry of Mass Media on Right to Information.”

There is also a dearth of awareness in rural areas on the act and how to file requests, especially in rural areas. In Arananayake, a rural village about 130km from the capital Colombo, which suffered a devastating landslide last year, villagers still living in temporary shelters had absolutely no idea that they could gain information from using the act.

The bigger test for the government will be to make sure that the RTI act does not end up a damp squib.

Media experts and government officials say that the new Right to Information Act will change the way media works in Sri Lanka. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
COLOMBO, Dec 14 2016 (IPS)

Sri Lanka’s upcoming 69th Independence Commemorations will be of special value to the island’s media – that is, if everything works as planned.

The newly minted Right to Information (RTI) act will take effect on Feb. 4, 2017, according to officials at the Ministry of Mass Media and the Department of Information. Sri Lanka’s beleaguered media – by some estimates over 20 journalists and media workers have been killed in the last decade – has been breathing more easily since January 2015 when a new government headed by President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe took power. The RTI act was one of their election pledges.“It is like putting the government in a glass box." --Media Minister Gayantha Karunathilaka

The act itself dates back to over two decades and has traveled a long and arduous road. Its first imprint was in the 1998 Colombo Declaration of Media Freedom and Social Responsibility. In 2004, Wickremasinghe, who briefly headed the government, initiated the drafting of the Freedom of Information Bill. It was tabled in parliament but could not be taken up for a vote since the government was ousted.

In 2010, current speaker Karu Jayasuriya introduced the 2004 draft as a private member’s motion, but that too was defeated. On June 24 this year, the RTI bill was finally passed by parliament. But there is still a long way to go.

The RTI Commission of five members is yet to be appointed. President Sirisena has ratified three names but is yet to fill the other two. Officials close to him say that the two final nominees have shown some reluctance, others say that the president is dragging his feet.

Officials at Ministry of Mass Media and the Department of Information, who are spearheading the changes in the public sector for the implementation of the Act, have chosen to stay quiet on this subject, though a few admit privately that there is a snag.

Despite the obstacles, officials at the two institutions are moving ahead, with the aim of announcing soon that by Feb. 4 next year, Sri Lankans can for the first time submit RTI requests.

Media Minister Gayantha Karunathilaka says that the RTI act will change the way the country is governed. “It is like putting the government in a glass box,” he recently told a gathering in southern Galle on the act.

The minister admits that the act will be a watershed in Sri Lanka media culture. “Now journalists can rely on verified, authenticated information from the government, rather than on hearsay.”

But he says that the larger effect will be on the country as a whole. “People don’t know about this that much. But with this act, politicians will have to think not twice, but thrice before they act, because the general public now has the right to seek and obtain information legally and the government is duty bound to give such information.”

Sri Lanka’s media faced repeated attacks like this burning of The Sunday Leader press on the outskirts of the capital Colombo in November 2007, but has breathed more easily since the new government took office in January 2015. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

Director General of Information Ranga Kalansooriya, a former journalist and a media trainer, puts Sri Lanka’s new act on a par with its Indian counterpart or even above it.

While the Indian act does not allow for overruling of RTI request denials based on national security once all the appeals are exhausted, the Sri Lanka version includes clauses where the commission can overrule some denials.

“For example, if there was a case of military corruption, like in an arms deal, this is a case of national defence. But if the public interest in corruption is heavier, then the commission can release this information,” Kalansooriya told IPS.

The Information Department has already begun to appoint and train public officials on handling RTI requests. Kalansooriya said that over 1,000 have so far been appointed. The government is also going to set up set up a special unit that will handle RTI requests relating to private companies and contractors working with government agencies.

RTI experts say that for the act to function efficiently, an attitude shift is required in the way public officials work, from being opaque to being transparent.

“The law itself requires a paradigm shift in governance because until the RTI Act was brought in, the understanding about how government business should be conducted is that information will be shared with people on a need-to-know basis,” said Indian expert Venkatesh Nayak.

“The RTI Act turns that on its head by saying that people have the right to seek information of any kind that they would want to get access to and the law provides for that access with the exception of certain circumstances when the disclosure may not be in the public interest.”

Nayak, who has been working with Sri Lankan non-governmental organsiations on building awareness, also feels the act needs to be promoted widely and is still largely unknown outside of urban areas, a fact even Media Minister Karunathilaka admits.

“Unlike other laws, the RTI law is perhaps the only law of its kind which is not going to get implemented unless there is a demand from the people to implement it,” Nayak said.

The 2009 murder of prominent editor Lasantha Wickrematunge sent shock waves through Sri Lankan media circles. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
COLOMBO, Feb 3 2015 (IPS)

On Jan. 8, 2009, the Sri Lankan media suffered a debilitating attack.

Lasantha Wickrematunge, an editor and unashamed critic of Sri Lanka’s then-President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his government, was killed just five minutes away from his office in Ratmalana, a suburb of the capital Colombo. Motorcycle-riding assailants, none of whom have been identified, waylaid him and assassinated him in broad daylight.

The murder sent shockwaves through the media community, already besieged by an administration that had a zero-tolerance policy towards criticism while it pushed for a military victory to end a long-running separatist war with Tamil rebels in the north of the island.

In 2014, Sri Lanka was ranked 85th on the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), with just 38 out of 100 points, indicating a strong need for anti-corruption measures -- Transparency International
The Wickrematunge murder was a catalyst that drove many others to take shelter outside of Sri Lanka, as state repression increased. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) at least 13 journalists have been killed in Sri Lanka, while dozens have fled in fear of deadly reprisals, since Mahinda Rajapaksa assumed office in 2005.

His assassination was also seen as an attack on one of the few news outlets committed to exposing corruption, revealing nepotism and pushing for good governance at a time when the so-called “right” to information was a pipedream.

Exactly six years to the day of the murder, Rajapaksa lost the presidency. Some of Wickrematunge’s close family members and associates have called the defeat divine retribution. And it has been hard to ignore the coincidence.

Since the election, the Sri Lankan media as a whole have been breathing lightly. The new government has eased travel restrictions and granted access to blocked or banned websites. New ministers have been quick to assure the public that national intelligence personnel have been ordered to stop listening in on private phone calls.

“The State Intelligence Service has been asked to strictly limit itself to national security operations, nothing else,” Cabinet Spokesperson and Health Minister Rajitha Senaratne told foreign correspondents on Jan. 28 in the capital.

The government is also pushing ahead with a long-delayed Right to Information (RTI) Act, which is likely to be presented to parliament by Feb. 20, little over a month after the new government took office.

A committee has been set up to draft the bill. It has been meeting with media rights groups and others to prepare a draft to be presented to the cabinet by Feb. 16.

This is not the first time such a bill has been moved in Sri Lanka’s parliament. In September 2010, Karu Jayasuriya, the deputy leader of the opposition United National Party (UNP), presented an RTI bill to parliament but was forced to withdraw it following strong resistance from the regime.

That was the last anyone heard of the transparency initiative for five years.

Under the new governing coalition helmed by President Maithripala Sirisena, however, the issues of transparency and good governance are finally drifting closer to the top of the agenda.

According to Gayantha Karunathilaka, the new minister of media, “There is a lot of house cleaning we have to do and we don’t want to waste any time.”

The bill will mandate by law the right to seek information from public offices and officials, and also protect those who seek such information. The new government has also appealed to those who fled the country to return though none have yet done so.

Ignorance fuels corruption

Economic analysts here feel that an RTI bill could act as a deterrent against rampant corruption, one of the main grievances with the Rajapaksa regime.

Corruption and waste by the former president and his detail was so extreme that the current interim budget, prepared ahead of General Elections in April, has indicated a cut of some 80 billion rupees (over 600,000 dollars) in the funds hitherto allocated to the presidential secretariat.

Experts say it is only the tip of the iceberg of the degree to which state funds were gobbled up by those in the president’s immediate family or closely allied with the regime.

“In countries like India, the RTI Act appears to have reduced corruption as reflected in the improvement in India’s rating in the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) produced by Transparency International [from 94^th place in 2012 to 85^th last year],” economist Muttukrishna Sarvananthan told IPS. “Many other developing countries have also experienced improvement in the CPI after Right To Information [Acts].”

He feels that such a step would pave the way for more scrutiny of public spending from the media when there is legal guarantee to seek such information from governments.

In 2014, Sri Lanka was ranked 85^th on the CPI, with just 38 out of 100 points, indicating a strong need for anti-corruption measures, according to the watchdog group.

In one of the most startling examples of corrupt public spending, the last government reportedly spent 846 million rupees, or roughly six million dollars, in a failed bid to host the Commonwealth Games in Sri Lanka.

Last week local newspapers reported that the Ministry of Highways, whose portfolio came under the former president, had spent 50 billion rupees in excess of its budget allocations in 2014, almost all of it on election campaigning for Rajapaksa who eventually lost the race.

Replacing self-censorship with public awareness

Sunil Jayasekera, convener of the Free Media Movement (FMM), the island’s foremost media rights group, said that the RTI Act formed part of a wider agenda.

“It is just one block in a larger wall that we need to build to reinforce civic rights here. Along with the RTI Act, the government should also look at establishing an independent commission for the judiciary and police […],” he stated.

Jayasekera said that the last five years have seen media rights erode like never before. The FMM official said that while scores of journalists have fled the country others have been forced to practice self-censorship.

“It is not only through fear and intimidation – they were the more obvious modes – there was a lot of censorship by way of financial control,” he added.

Several privately-held media houses changed ownership in the last five years, including The Sunday Leader, the leading English-language daily edited by Wickrematunge that at times acted as the lone deterrent against nepotism.

Most of the new investors were suspected of supporting the Rajapaksa administration.

In one such instance, a leading weekly newspaper management told its staff soon after the election that it had lost all advertising revenue, simply because over 90 percent of its ads came from government agencies.

The newspaper also had an unwritten law of not writing anything about the casino-related investments entered into by the Rajapaksa government – estimated at over one billion dollars.

The self-imposed restriction was suspected to be due to the new ownership’s business interests in gaming.

“That is just one example, there are dozens of such in the last decade or so,” Jayasekera explained.

He said that the new government should set the tone without delay to indicate that it supports a vibrant media culture.

“The FMM was one of over 40 civil organisations that supported the Sirisena campaign on a broad reform agenda, and the government is duty-bound to keep those pledges,” he stressed.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

The social role of journalists in Honduras is restricted under the official secrets law because they will not be able to report information that the state regards as “classified,” under the controversial new regulations. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

By Thelma Mejía
TEGUCIGALPA, Jul 9 2014 (IPS)

The new official secrets law in Honduras clamps down on freedom of expression, strengthens corruption and enables public information on defence and security affairs to be kept secret for up to 25 years, according to a confidential report seen by IPS.

The Law on Classification of Public Documents related to Security and National Defence, better known as the official secrets law, was approved on the eve of the conclusion of the last parliamentary term, on Jan. 24.

“It [information about corruption] would be classified for 25 years, by which time the statute of limitations for prosecuting public servants for corruption would have expired, and no one would be held accountable,” says the IAIP
In a marathon two-day session, Congress approved a hundred decrees and laws to smooth the path of the new government of President Juan Orlando Hernández, who took office Jan. 27 and belongs to the right-wing National Party, like his predecessor Porfirio Lobo.

“This law lets the government behave like a cat that covers its own dirt,” shopkeeper Eduardo Tinoco told IPS wryly. He pays 20 dollars a week extortion money to one of the gangs that control El Sitio, a neighbourhood in the northeast of the capital.

“I pay taxes here for everything, even to be allowed to live, and that secrecy law will only be used to cover up the diversion of funds used for security and other government business. There are no two ways about it,” said Tinoco, who owns a small grocery store.

The law was blocked in October 2013 because of opposition from the Honduran Community Media Association (AMCH) and international groups, which regard it as a violation of the right to information and freedom of expression.

But it was reconsidered in January. How this occurred is not really known, because there are no audio records in the parliament archives that indicate when the bill was reintroduced, legislature officials told IPS on condition of anonymity.

A report by a team of experts for the Institute for Access to Public Information (IAIP) says that the official secrets law lacks a clear definition of “national security” and this ambiguity opens the way to discretionality, so that anything considered sensitive may be classified as secret.

The IAIP is the autonomous state body responsible for ensuring transparency in Honduras, according to the Law on Transparency and Access to Public Information. IPS obtained the report, which is due to be made public in a few weeks.

Article 3 of the official secrets law indicates that the following can be classified as confidential, in the interests of “national security”: “matters, actions, contracts, documents, information, data and objects whose knowledge by unauthorised persons may harm or endanger national security and/or defence and the fulfilment of its goals in these areas.”

The law sets four classification levels: private, confidential, secret and ultra secret, with periods of secrecy of five, 10, 15 and 25 years respectively, which may be extended as determined by the National Security and Defence Council which is responsible for classifying and declassifying material.

This Council is made up of the three branches of state, the Attorney General’s Office, the ministers of Defence and Security, the national Information and Intelligence Office and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the armed forces.

Information classified as “private” is lower level information, documentation or strategic internal material within state bodies that could cause “undesired institutional effects” if they came to light.

“Confidential” is the term attributed to intermediate level information, which could cause “imminent risk” or a direct threat to security, national defence or public order if it were made public, the law says.

Materials classified as “secret” are high level information at the national level, in the strategic internal and external spheres of the state, revelation of which poses an imminent danger to “constitutional order, security, national defence, international relations and the fulfilment of national goals.”

Finally, “ultra secret” is the highest level classification and is described as material which, if in the realm of public knowledge, would provoke “exceptionally serious” internal and external harm, threatening security, defence, sovereignty and territorial integrity, and the achievement of national goals.

Omar Rivera, of the Civil Society Group (GSC), an association of political advocacy and human rights organisations, told IPS that the “broad discretionality provided by the law is very worrying, because it provides a cloak of secrecy that can cover everything.”

His main concern is related to the security tax that has been levied on businesses and individuals for the past two years, as a contribution to the fight against insecurity and violence. This law “will make it impossible to get factual information on how the millions of dollars the state collects are spent,” he said.

The IAIP report highlights the same discretionalities, pointing out that any information about a public official being implicated in corruption can be classified as “ultra secret”.

In this case it would be classified for 25 years, by which time the statute of limitations for prosecuting public servants for corruption would have expired, and no one would be held accountable, the report analysing the law says.

Meanwhile, human rights expert Roberto Velásquez told IPS that the law directly targets journalism and freedom of expression, by putting a stranglehold on investigating or disseminating information.

He was referring to Article 10 of the law, which establishes that “when it can be foreseen that classified material may come to the knowledge of the media, these shall be notified of the nature of the material, and shall respect its classified nature.”

Also, any person having knowledge of classified information is obliged to “keep it secret” and report it to the nearest civil, police or military authority.

The new law directly contradicts the Transparency Law, in force for the past five years, by removing the IAIP’s powers to classify information regarded as secret, and overriding guarantees for freedom of expression and investigative journalism.

Doris Madrid, the head of IAIP, told IPS that it is hoping that the official secrets law will be reformed, on the grounds that it is unconstitutional and violates international treaties, but a proposal to revise or repeal it was turned down in Congress in March.

IPS learned that Transparency International made the signing of an agreement with the government on Open Budgets conditional on a revision of the law.

Honduras is regarded as one of the Latin American countries with the highest perception of corruption and insecurity. In April, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) indicated that this country of 8.4 million people has the highest murder rate in the world.

The Observatory on Violence at the National Autonomous University of Honduras reported this rate as 79.7 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. But now the authorities have refused to give any more figures on violent deaths to the Observatory, its members have complained.

Michael Mubangizi (l) and his wife Jennifer Musimenta (r) with their daughter Babirye. They do not know what happened to Babirye’s twin whose body disappeared after Musimenta gave birth in Uganda’s national referral hospital. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

By Amy Fallon
KAMPALA, Mar 27 2014 (IPS)

Dressed in a white dress with black polka dots and pink and red carnations, white knee-high socks and matching patent shoes, Babirye recently celebrated her second birthday. 

“She’s doing well, eating well,” Jennifer Musimenta told IPS in Uganda’s local Luganda language as her husband, Michael Mubangizi, acted as a translator. It is an unwritten policy in Ugandan health facilities that patients were never given access to their own medical records.

“But I’m always thinking about the second child, whether she’s alive or not alive, because I don’t know the truth. I’m always worried.”

The child she’s referring to is Babirye’s sister. In Luganda, Babirye means the first-born of female twins.

Twins are seen as a special blessing among Ugandan families. Mubangizi had a set on his father’s side before his wife gave birth to two girls on Mar. 14, 2012, at Mulago Hospital.

The couple did not know they were expecting twins until Musimenta delivered at Mulago, which is Uganda’s national referral hospital and the country’s largest health facility based in the capital, Kampala.

But within minutes of Musimenta giving birth to the second child, whom they named Nakato, which means second female twin in Luganda, they were told she had died.

The pair were then denied access to their baby’s body. Despite pleading for her own medical records, Musimenta was refused a copy of these too.

“We looked for that dead body for three days,” Mubangizi, who immediately reported the case to the police, told IPS.

“We checked in the mortuary, in the maternity ward, everywhere in the hospital. There was no dead child,” the 30-year-old mechanic said.

Three long days later, the couple were handed the body of a dead baby.

“It was very fresh, as if it had been delivered at that moment,” said Mubangizi. “We said that is not our baby.”

A DNA test, which the desperate pair resorted to, revealed the child was not theirs. And now they don’t know for sure if their daughter is alive or dead.

Nakibuuka Noor Musisi, the programme manager for strategic litigation at advocacy group Centre for Health, Human Rights and Development (CEHURD), said that cases of missing and stolen babies were shockingly all too common in Ugandan hospitals.

“There’s so many cases of mothers who have gone to hospitals [to give birth], especially this particular hospital, and their babies are not given to them,” she told IPS.

“These cases are just reported by the media but their parents don’t take them up [with the courts] because maybe they don’t know where to go.”

She added that it was an unwritten policy in health facilities that patients were never given access to their own medical records in this East African nation.

Grieving, and seeking the truth about their daughter, Mubangizi and  Musimenta, with backing from CEHURD, sued the executive director of Mulago Hospital and the Ugandan attorney general in July 2013.

“When we were faced with this particular case we were forced to go to court to show that actually this is a problem that is happening in the country,” Musisi explained.

The couple argued their constitutional rights had been violated through being denied the access to their medical records, the opportunity to nurture and bring up their child and in the hospital taking her away without permission.

All of this has been coupled with the daily mental anguish and agony they have endured, and are continuing to endure, through not having access to her or her body.

On Wednesday, Mar. 26 the High Court of Uganda ordered Mulago Hospital to furnish the couple with outstanding medical documents, a registry of children delivered on the same day as Babirye and her sister, a list of health workers then on duty and a copy of the DNA test.

Musisi said the ruling set a significant precedent for the rights of Ugandan patients to access their medical records.

“The constitution says that everyone shall have the right to access information, which is in the hands of the state as long as it does not put the state or the security of the state at risk,” she said.

Wednesday’s ruling also has implications for Uganda’s stunningly high maternal morality rate – 438 deaths per 100,000 live births, one of the world’s highest.

“Imagine if you’re a mother who has had a caesarean section and no [medical record] is given to you. As soon as you’re discharged from the hospital, you get home and probably you have a [complication],” said Musisi, speaking at the high court.

“That would mean that you have to go back to that particular health facility. What happens if the facility is very far from your home? These are the reasons we see mothers die.”

The case puts the spotlight on the reason why so many Ugandan women are terrified to give birth in hospitals.

“I won’t go back to deliver in that hospital because what happened two years ago could happen again,” said Musimenta.

Mulago Hospital, however, has showed interest in an out of court settlement with Musimenta and Mubangizi. Mulago’s legal team declined to comment.

But what Musimenta and Mubangizi ultimately want is the truth about their daughter.

“I’m always thinking about what happened to her. I don’t know whether she was kidnapped,” said Mubangizi.

“There are some people overseas who can’t conceive and they give money to the nurses [to buy the babies].”

According to local reports babies are allegedly stolen from hospitals but there are also claims that some health workers have been mixing up babies, with parents been given the wrong newborns or dead bodies.

The couple say they’ll use the settlement from the hospital towards getting closure. They are unable to afford the services of an investigator to probe the details of their missing child.

“When someone has twins it’s an honorary thing in our tradition, we do dancing and singing to welcome the twins,” said Mubangizi.

“So we’ll go to our village and have a traditional ceremony. If the baby is alive, she will reveal herself.”

Caption: Activists protest against so-called amendments to the Right to Information Act in Kashmir. Credit: Athar Parvaiz/IPS

By Athar Parvaiz
SRINAGAR , Oct 30 2012 (IPS)

Bashir Ahmad Malik was flabbergasted when a helicopter carrying an Indian official from Kashmir’s summer capital of Srinagar landed in his resident Drang village, just 17 miles away from its point of departure.

The 41-year-old local, whose village is devoid of basic amenities like clean water and electricity, could not reconcile Chief Minister Omar Abdullah’s extravagance with the woes of Kashmir’s mostly rural population who are struggling to survive.

“Since I am part of the Right to Information (RTI) movement, I decided to file an RTI application to (get details) of the costs of the chief minister’s helicopter sorties,” Malik told IPS.

He first submitted his request for information with the chief minister’s office in June 2011 but didn’t receive a response, prompting him to file a complaint in Kashmir’s State Information Commission (SIC), constituted under the RTI Act of 2009.

Thanks to the empowerment of information commissions across India, Malik’s complaint yielded rapid results: within days he was informed that the chief minister and some of his cabinet colleagues had spent 120 million Indian rupees (2.5 million dollars) on helicopter sorties in just three years.

This expenditure is particularly significant when viewed in contrast to the basic needs of Kashmir’s citizens.

According to the official Economic Survey of 2011, 35 percent of the state’s inhabited areas are not connected to roads. The Valley’s only tertiary hospital, Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences (or SKIMS), which caters to a population of six million people, faces acute shortages of the most basic medical supplies.

“We have just 10 ventilators when we need at least 25,” Dr. Showkat Zargar, director of SKIMS, told IPS.

Early this year, as many as 378 babies died in the G B Pant childcare hospital in three months, because of a shortage of ventilators and warmers.

According to data from Kashmir’s department of education, 77 percent of schools in Kashmir lack toilet facilities, while 64 percent of schools lack drinking water facilities.

RTI activists multiply

Though Malik was not aware of the full impact of his actions at the time, news of his bold move traveled swiftly across the state of Jammu and Kashmir.

The chief minister and his cabinet have since been forced to take bumpy car rides to far-flung destinations, at least on some occasions.

Meanwhile, despite hurdles, villagers throughout Kashmir are now using the RTI mechanism to expose corruption at all levels of the government bureaucracy, though many of those found guilty manage to evade punishment.

In August this year, a sarpanch (village head) was made to refund half a million Indian rupees (10,000 dollars) of public funds that he had swindled from a rural housing development project, after Fayaz Ahmad Wani, a local villager, exposed the scam by filing an RTI application with the block development officer.

“I am so happy that my RTI application brought justice to myself and my fellow villagers,” Wani told IPS.

Before the implementation of the RTI Act in India in 2005 and in Kashmir in 2009 – which stipulates that public officials and authorities must respond to requests for information within 30 days – ordinary citizens had no channel through which to demand transparency in government decisions or transactions.

Prior to 2009, information was restricted by various laws including the Official Secrets Act (OSA) of 1923, “which is continuing even after the British left the sub-continent,” Dr. Showkat Hussain, a law professor at the Central University of Kashmir, lamented to IPS.

“Under the official OSA, which allegedly deals with cases of ‘espionage’, sentences (for so-called anti-national activity) range from three to 14 years,” Hussain said.

He recalled the case of the Delhi-based Kashmiri journalist, Iftikhar Gilani, “who was booked under the OSA in 2002 and finally only released after a sustained campaign by human rights activists determined that the charges against him could never be proved.”

According to Hussain, the RTI Act is the best antidote for draconian legislature like the OSA, since it  “empowers ordinary citizens and gives them the courage to take on bureaucrats and politicians”.

This past April, officials in the Kupwara district announced the completion of post-flood repairs on several irrigation channels, in a project that cost the state 2.6 million dollars. When a local RTI activist drew attention to possible corruption in the scheme, inspectors found that not  a single one of the alleged repairs had been carried out on the site.

Government skirts the law

But the Act is contingent upon the government following its rules and guidelines.

Early last month, State Information Commission (SIC) officials and social activists in Kashmir accused the Omar Abdullah government of weakening the law by skirting and amending it at will.

Recent government amendments have “taken the soul out of the Act and swept away our powers,” SIC Commissioner Ghulam Rasool Sofi told IPS.

“The old rules provided (guidelines) for the structure and functioning of the information commission such as division of labour and working hours. The new rules delete all these provisions,” Raja Muzaffar Bhat, one of the pioneers of the RTI movement in Kashmir, told IPS.

“The move (goes) against the basic spirit of transparency. This has been done just to stop the commission from exercising its powers.”

The Commission has also been divested of its judicial powers. “Repealing this rule means officials can simply ignore the summons and directions of the commission,” Wajahat Habibullah, former chief information commissioner of India, credited with drafting Kashmir’s RTI Act, told IPS.

Bhat says that the Kashmir government has never displayed a positive attitude towards the RTI Act.

“Despite the fact that the Act has been in existence for three years, the government is yet to obey one of its most basic rules, which requires every state authority to computerise its records and pro-actively publish certain categories of information so that citizens need only (go through the minimum channels) to request that data formally,” he said.

According to Pervez Imroz, a noted human rights lawyer, the new rules are silent about implementation of SIC orders and appeals. “The old rules made it binding for officials to implement the SIC orders. But the new clause says that citizens must go through the high court to get an order implemented,” he said, adding that this often discourages citizens from pursuing RTI applications.

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