What has ten years of RTI achieved?

Pamela Philipose

TEN years after the Right to Information Act promised the country a “practical regime of right to information for citizens”, what have we gained as citizens? Has it helped to usher in required "transparency and accountability" in the working of every public authority? That this promise was at all made by a power elite notoriously resistant to scrutiny was itself an achievement requiring the concerted efforts of remarkable social activists and a few good men and women in the bureaucracy. But 10 years later that promise has still remained largely that — a promise.
That the Government of India has as yet not deemed it fit to appoint a Chief Information Officer five months after the last one retired underlines one of the myriad ways in which that promise could falter.
For the Government of India, the Right to Information Act has been, in G.M. Young's immortal words, rather like being married to a duchess: the honour is almost greater than the pleasure. If those in power have worn the accountability law like a badge of their supposed “good governance”, it is also true they have fought hard to undermine it in every way possible.
In fact, as soon as the Act was passed by the UPA government in 2005 in the first blush of its return to power after almost a decade in the wilderness, every important government institution had sought exemption from its purview on the grounds of protecting official secrets in the national interest. The bureaucracy which, from the days of the British Raj had thrived on opaque government functioning also demanded that file notings not be made public, once again in supposed “national interest”. 
Some five years later the government put forward the suggestion that the Act be amended to “discourage frivolous and vexatious representations”. At each juncture, it was the swift response from civil society actors that helped to stymie the concerted effort to re-introduce a veil of secrecy over government decision.
In 2013, when the Chief Information Commissioner took the important initiative to bring all national political parties under the Act's purview, political interests across the spectrum swiftly came together and an amendment to the Act was framed to counter it. Clearly, because access to information can potentially shake up the status quo, those in power whether under the UPA or under the NDA; whether a Manmohan Singh or a Narendra Modi, tend to be extremely wary of it. During his election campaign for the 2014 general election, the latter had mockingly asked an election crowd, “Has the RTI given you something for your stomach?”
There is, of course, much to criticise about how the Act has been enforced. In 2013, the RTI Assessment and Advocacy Group along with Samya-Centre for Equity Studies recently reviewed its impact from 2011-2013 in a study entitled, “People's Monitoring of the RTI Regime in India”. Many important trends emerged from this exercise, including the formidable backlog in clearing applications that exists. The review estimated that it would take a state like Madhya Pradesh 60 years to clear applications filed today and while West Bengal may be tad more efficient in this regard, it would still take 17 years before a petition filed in the state is attended to. In terms of providing information promptly, Delhi did at least twice better than Bihar. We know how court cases moved at a glacial pace, and it seems that RTI petitions were heading in the same direction. The primary reason for this is a lack of personnel. If the judicial backlog has been in large part created by the sorry shortage of judges, the lack of a sufficient number of information commissioners was the single biggest reason for the unconscionable delay in processing RTI applications.
Who were the people filing these applications? What were their compulsions? These were just among the more intriguing questions the review set out to answer and the data was revealing. It found that women applicants, for instance, were insignificant in number, constituting just 8 per cent of the total applicants. Equally striking was the fact that although two-thirds of India's population lives in villages, only 14 per cent of applicants were rural. Ironically, the lack of information about the right to information seems to lie at the heart of this and the authors of the review observed that the authorities have not taken enough pains to raise general awareness about this right.
While redressal of personal grievance was a significant motivation for the filing of RTI complaints, a fair proportion of inquiries were linked to issues of public interest, whether they concerned the actions of public authorities or the use of public resources. This, of course, was highly contentious terrain. Over these 10 years, many information activists have faced harassment, assaults and death threats. In May 2008, there was the shocking case of Lalit Mehta. He was killed for exposing corruption in rural job guarantee projects in Palamu, Jharkhand, and his killers have eluded justice to date. The CBI has just launched a fresh probe into the case involving Satish Shetty, who was hacked to death after unearthing a major land-grab scam and alerting the police in Lonavala, Maharashtra about it. Mehta and Shetty are just two among several others who have paid with their lives for exposing unscrupulous and powerful elements through the seemingly innocuous pursuit of information.
Here is evidence of governmental apathy in putting together an effective protective regime for RTI activists. The Whistleblowers Protection Act, 2011, was passed in early 2014 but the rules are yet to be framed, so it has not been operationalised. As the authors of the review underlined, what was urgently required was to treat all forms of intimidation against RTI activists, once proven, as punishable offences under criminal law.
The biggest lesson of the last 10 years since the Act came into force is that Indian democracy, if it is to be meaningful, has to have a strong, effective RTI regime that is equally owned by those who govern and those who are governed. If public authorities “maintain all records duly catalogued and indexed” and provide “as much information suo motu to the public at regular intervals”, as is required under the RTI Act, perhaps the need to file applications for information will decline.
A recent move by the government to make available online all the replies provided by various ministries is a step in the right direction. How about mainstreaming another good suggestion: Setting up a national task force that is mandated to scan all government records and make them available to the public through a searchable data base?
The writer is a senior fellow with the Indian Council of Social Science Research.