The awareness of the RTI Act is very low in rural india. It continues to be an urban phenomena.

It has been two years since the Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005 came into existence. Looking back at the RTI movement, though still nascent, it has picked up enormous momentum and has mobilised significant sections of India’s population. From urban issues like commercialisation and land use to cutting down bribes in mundane sarkari tasks, RTI has been there and done it all. In fact it is harkening to note the recent instances of a nine year old child filing an RTI application with the police. Truly, the RTI revolution is spreading.

But several concerns continue to plague the successful implementation of the Act. These can be addressed from the supply side i.e. with regard to how the government supplies information and from the demand side i.e. with regard to who requests the information and quality of information sought.
If one were to rate the performance of government departments based on the implementation of the RTI Act, one would say that the quality of implementation is proportional to level of governance of the public authority. Therefore most central ministries have made the declaration of their 17 manuals stipulated by the  act and placed them on their website, further by and large these departments respond to RTI applications within the parameters of the Act.

As we go down to states and further down to the block and gram panchayat levels, the implementation of the Act is non existent or is done with the sole purpose of discouraging the citizen to seek information from the public authority The Sikkim Government has made no voluntary declaration and charges Rs 100 as application fees and Rs.10 for every page when the norm is Rs 10 and Rs 2 respectively. None of the several people we have met who hail from rural areas have ever seen a 4(1)(b) (Voluntary declaration) declaration at the panchayat level.

The Information Commissionors (IC) is a critical component in the successful implementation of the Act as they ensure that recalcitrant PIOs (Public Information Officers) are pulled up. But they continue to take a lenient stand against defaulting PIOs despite the Act empowering the Commissioner to levy penalties. In some instances the commitment of the IC’s itself is suspect. The West Bengal IC is merely a rubber stamp, appointed by the state government to stall the successful implementation of the Act. This can be gauged from the fact that the pendency for complaints and appeals have reached an excess of 12 months in West Bengal.

PIOs themselves complain that they have received inadequate training on the Act and are at a complete loss on how to handle RTI requests. Some forward the application to the information commission instead of answering it themselves or put in drawer and hope the problem will disappear. Often PIOs have complained that they have been appointed unilaterally from the top and have not been given any training on how to handle RTI requests.

Even today a significant proportion of the RTI requests are submitted by government officials who use it to claim the perks and benefits of their office. The next biggest category of applications are from the urban citizen regarding issues like their roads, land use or commercialisation in their immediate neighbourhood. Applications on issues of real social and national interests that tackle rising poverty and inequity in Indian society are rare. This is a function of the times we live in where individual interest is above national interest and how RTI was positioned by many of us from the NGO sector in the initial days of the RTI Act.

Even today RTI is looked as a tool to fight petty corruption. The fact is that RTI can be used to improve the administration also. Sailesh Gandhi in Mumbai has used RTI successfully to ensure that officers Annual Confidential Reports (ACRs) are filed as per the norms. RTI can also successfully be used to implement laws. The Burning Brains Society in Chandigarh filed 293 RTI application regarding the implementation of a Supreme Court order, forcing the administration to declare a ban on public smoking. The application of RTI on these fronts is meagre but the above two instances give us hope that quality of RTI intervention will eventually improve.

The fact is that the government still spends a significant part of its allocation in rural India. Yet the awareness of the Act is very low in rural india. The RTI Act continues to be an urban phenomena. Here civil society, media and the government needs to do a lot more in spreading awareness to ensure quality of governance.

Adam Smith, the father of modern day economics, once defined an ideal free market as the one where information is freely available to all instantly so that the citizen can make the best choices possible. After 60 years of dependence, our internal information asymmetry is one of the critical reasons why our country continues to poor and unable to claim its rightful place in the comity of nations. RTI has dented this asymmetry significantly but a lot more needs to done and invitation to every Indian citizen to participate in this movement is open.

(The writer is trustee, Sakshi Trust, the NGO involved in RTI  awareness in Bangalore.)

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