Abstract
The right to information act, 2005 was a revolutionary act that envisaged to provide the citizens of India with transparent as well as accountable public bodies across the country. It was the first time when the demands of the social activists were met and such a powerful act providing transparency in governmental systems came into force. Nevertheless, there was much more to come as the mere enactment of the act was not the entire solution. Also, there were many more challenges to be tackled including the proper implementation of the act at ground level. In India, every year almost 4-5 million RTI’s are filed of which a large number of applications remain unanswered. The backlog of unanswered RTI applications is increasing with each passing year. There are a lot more discrepancies that cannot be ignored including the vulnerable state of infrastructure of RTI workplaces and offices. Further, even after more than a decade since the RTI act got enacted, there are still issues like the unawareness of the RTI Act in the rural areas due to which they are unable to get its benefit. With the passing of time, new issues also got evolved regarding the viability of the act including the safety of the RTI activists who incessantly remains under threat, making their life vulnerable with each passing day. Further, on the ground level, even the authorities or the departments who were envisioned by the act to provide citizens with information, are in a terrible state due to the substantial number of vacancies of information commissioners across the country being vacant. So, the research paper tends to analyse and study all the above-mentioned problems in more detail and the solutions with which the said problems could be resolved.
Challenges in implementation of RTI act
It has been more than a decade since the Right to Information Act came into existence. It was one of the major achievements of the UPA-1 Govt. led by Dr Manmohan Singh. The basic object of the Right to Information Act is to empower the citizens, promote transparency and accountability in the working of the governments and prevent corruption. The Act has empowered the citizens of the country to have access to the information in all public authorities and bodies across the country.
However, even after a decade since the act has been passed, the proper implementation of the act is a long shot resulting transparency and accountability of public accounts still a goal to be achieved. Some of the major impediments to the proper implementation of the act includes
- Record-keeping practices within the bureaucracy are poor which is prejudice to Section 4 of the RTI act. The information sought by citizens can be provided only if the records are maintained properly. Section 4 mandates all public departments to computerise all data and revise it regularly on a daily basis so that information could be accessed from any part of the country and the problem of missing and losing files could be eliminated.
- Lack of staff and infrastructure for running information commission is another impediment in the effectiveness of the Act.
- Protection of RTI activists is another major challenge. They go through harassment, assault and death threats on a daily basis. There are numerous instances when RTI activists paid mortally for exposing unscrupulous and powerful people indulged in corruption. According to the rules[1] proposed few years back if an RTI applicant dies before the government sends the reply, the application will stand closed and the information sought will not be provided. In the year 2016, according to report (Advocacy group Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative report) there have been at least 56 deaths of RTI activists. It is also to be noted that there were at least 275 more cases like physical assault, threats, intimidation, harassment etc. 51 activists were reportedly killed and almost five reportedly committed suicides. In reality, the actual number can be even higher and could increase if probe over the deaths of activists commences.
- An October 2014 report (RTI Assessment and Analysis Group (RAAG)) found that on an average, 4-5 million applications are filed under the Act every year. The number of requests pending with public authorities rose from 6,26,748 in 2009-10 to 9,62,630 in 2013-14, an increase of 53.5 per cent. The report estimated that it would take a state like Madhya Pradesh, almost 60 years to dispose of off an application if filed on present-day while for a state like West Bengal it would take around 17 years for a petition to even get acknowledged.
- Many officials have found various ways of misleading applicants by providing ambiguous and irrelevant information. Public authorities often misuse various sections of the RTI Act including Sec. 6(3), Sec. 7(9) and one observation of the Supreme Court[2]. Also, acts like the Official Secrets Act are used by officials as an excuse for preventing the people from receiving information asked by them. Section 6(3) says that if a public authority receives a request for information which is held by another public authority, “the public authority, to which such an application is made, shall transfer the application or such part of it as may be appropriate to that other public authority”. Section 7(9) says that “An information shall ordinarily be provided in the form in which it is sought unless it would disproportionately divert the resources of the public authority or would be detrimental to the safety or preservation of the record in question”. Some authorities try to escape from providing the information asked, by misusing sections like Section 6(3), even without going through their own records. Officials also cite Section 7(9) for the denial of information. Moreover, a part of the Supreme Court order of August 2011 is also widely used by several authorities to avoid disclosures. The Supreme Court in the said order observed that “The nation does not want a scenario where 75 per cent of the staff of public authorities spends 75 per cent of their time in collecting and furnishing information to applicants instead of discharging their regular duties.”
- Public authorities also have a common belief that the introduction of RTI has led to a lot of hassle, as they now have an additional workload of responding to applications asking for information. Moreover, there are also many instances where people have filed even more than five applications on a particular issue to get the information sought.
- Governmentsare also not seen very active towards ensuring transparency in public offices. For instance, the country has seen, the post of Chief Information Commissioner being vacant for 9 months.
- It has also been seen that the political parties seek RTI as a threat to themselves and are not interested in ensuring transparency in the democratic system. For instance, in 2013, the Chief Information Commissioner took the important initiative to bring all political parties under the ambit of the act. The said proposal never came into existence as all political parties came together and resisted the move. Apart from this, the electoral bond scheme[3], 2018 made the transparency of funding in political parties more opaque. The scheme introduced provisions which provide that, the name of the person donating to a political party will remain anonymous and undisclosed. Also, the government in march 2018 passed the amendment[4] in Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, 2010 which has exempted all the political parties from getting examined on all the foreign fundings they received, since the year 1976. These all developments are definitely disheartening for all the RTI activists who want political parties under the purview of the RTI act.
- Above all, the biggest challenge for the effective implementation of the RTI act is the unawareness of the people. Surprisingly, though two-third of India’s population lives in villages, only few of the applicants were rural. Also, the number of female applicants was insignificant in number.
- How can RTI act be more effective?
- Dissemination of awareness about the Right to Information in rural areas so that more rural people could practice this right.
- Providing adequate training to the staff of information commissions across the country so that they could do their work more effectively.
- Enactment of some supplementary laws parallel to RTI Act such as Whistle-blower protection Act.
- Providing adequate infrastructure to public information officers making them more accountable.
- Parliament should jointly take initiative for making all required and necessary amendments in the RTI act.
- Present situations prevailing regarding RTI act across the country.
Vacancy of posts of Information Commissioners and a backlog of pending RTI’s across the country could be understood from the following table (Annual convention of CIC,2018)
IC Post vacant Backlog
CIC 4 vacant posts, 4 more by Dec 1, 23,962 (29/6/18)
2018, including chief.
Andra Pradesh. Commissioner defunct since May
- ———-
In October 2018, 3 commissioners
appointed, but no Chief.
West Bengal 9 vacant posts More than 8,000
(31/10/17)
Odisha 8 vacant posts More than 10,000
(31/10/17)
Telangana 9 vacant posts 9341 (30/06/18)
Maharashtra 3 vacant posts More than 40,000
(28/02/18)
Gujarat 9 vacant posts More than 4,500 (29/6/18)
Kerala 6 vacant posts Nearly 14,000 (31/10/17)
III. 12th Annual Convention of the Central Information commission
The convention was held on December 6, 2017, on discussing various aspects and facets of Right to Information act. The important developments which came out of the convention include
- The mandatory disclosure of information under section 4 of the RTI act is deliberately discouraged by almost all central ministries.
- All the documents as envisaged by section 4, were not found to be in digital form & duly catalogued and indexed.
Even Department OF Personnel and Training (DOPT) vide its order in 2013, to tackle the discrepancies, mandated all ministries to
- Appoint nodal officer for keeping a check on up to what extent ministries are complying with Section 4 of the RTI act.
- Ensure that public bodies get transparency audits done by third parties.
- Central Information Commission to randomly check & conduct disclosure audits.
Even after the DOPT order, the public bodies did not comply with it and the question of the prevailing condition of the RTI act is still a question due to disinterest and unwillingness of the governments.
- Audit of Institute of Secretariat Training & Management (ISTM)
According to the audit done by ISTM ( AuditReportofProactiveDisclosure2015) more challenges came into light regarding the ground reality of the Right To Information act. The important ones are as follow
- Most government departments do not comply with Section 4 of the RTI act.
- Websites of the ministries or public bodies are not constructed properly.
- Data in the websites is not revised on a daily basis causing an increase in the backlog of pending cases.
Also, the study done by the ISTM shows that a huge amount of vital information is not displayed on the official websites of the different ministries/government departments. The missing information falls in the following categories:
- Decision-making process, the delegation of powers, duties and responsibilities of officials and the system of compensation paid to them;
- Minutes of meetings of various committees and boards, details of the relevant Acts, rules, instruments, manuals, office orders, custodians of various categories of documents held by the organisation;
- RTI applications and appeals received and their responses, details of Public Information Officers, FAA, Nodal Officer and other facilities available to citizens for obtaining information;
- Details of domestic and foreign visits undertaken by the senior officials
- Details of mechanism to redress grievances of affected persons, mainly employees, clients and customers;
- Discretionary and Non-discretionary Grants and details of the beneficiaries of subsidy; and, Details about Public-Private Partnerships and outcomes of such ventures.
It is an equally surprising fact that citizens have to file RTI applications even for information which should have been already in the public domain. Some of the erroneous replies[5] of the RTI queries include:
- The Reserve Bank of India recently disclosed that an amount of Rs 2.28 lakh crore has been written off as non-performing asset over the last decade. The beneficiary institutions/individuals are however not identified. In the RTI regime, such a huge cost burden on the present generation should have been voluntarily disclosed to the public but the government did not reveal it till asked for.
- Railway Board refused to share the details of losses in the last five years.
- As many as 69 MPs of the Lok Sabha did not comply with the requirement of disclosing their assets and liabilities.
- Record of India’s complaints to the United Nations Security Council on Kashmir has been denied while the relevant documents are available in reports/books by the experts on India-Pakistan relations.
- N. Vohra Committee Report, 1983, on nexus between politicians and criminals have been disclosed but its annexures have been withheld as missing or untraceable.
- RTI query revealed that this government spent more than Rs 3000 crore on publicity but social media expenditure was not disclosed.
- Second Administrative Reforms Commission (ARC)
The right to information law meant to empower Indians and bring transparency in governance appeared to be losing steam with the number of queries going down mainly because of stone-walling of information by officials and slow disposal of appeals. One of the important provision through which public bodies can prevent themselves from giving information is the Official Secrets Act (OSA). It is an anti-espionage act which empowers public bodies not to disclose the information if the information is of confidential nature. But many times this act is misused by public bodies and they use it as a tool to prevent sharing of information with the public. But when the second Administrative Reforms Commission was constituted, it recommended that the Official Secrets Act should be revised in the light of the RTI act. Even Section 8(2) of the RTI act mentions that public interest will prevail over the OSA if the public interest is of such an important nature. But still, there are no clear cut guidelines regarding the ambiguity between OSA and the RTI act.
- Proposed amendments as a threat to the RTI act
The right to information act has always been a third wheel for the governments and they have always tried to suppress this act. The act was enacted in 2005 and since then governments have made many attempts to amend the act by proposing amendments several times.
The major proposed amendments include
2006- amendment to remove ‘file notings’ from the purview of law
2010- amendment for stoping frivolous and vexatious RTI queries.
2013- amendment to remove political parties from the ambit of RTI law.
2018- amendments as proposed by justice Srikrishna committee.
As the years passed many amendments were proposed in the RTI act. Among all of them, the most controversial amendment considered till date is the RTI amendment bill, 2018. It was introduced in the parliament but after facing a lot of opposition, it did not pass. Again, in the year 2019, it was reintroduced in the parliament and was passed comfortably. It is alleged that the said amendment changed the entire hypothesis of theact. The act after amendment, now provides the government with the power of framing rules regarding salaries, allowances and conditions of service, of all information commissioners from the centre to the state level. Earlier, there were no such provisions available under the Act.
VII. Conclusion
The RTI act came into force in the year 2005 after a long-fought battle of the RTI activists. The act empowered the citizens of the country by giving them the right to know, which is still a dream for citizens of many countries around the world. Though the act has been one of the most transparent acts in the world still there are many complexities on the ground level which are needed to be rectified. Social awareness and the knowledge of their rights among people is the ultimate solution which can help to eliminate all the impediments, coming in the path of proper and smooth implementation of the revolutionary RTI act.
[1] Nidhi Sharma, RTI cases likely to be closed after applicants death, The Economic Times (April 3, 2017, 12:29 AM IST) https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/rti-cases-likely-to-be-closed-after-applicants-death/articleshow/57980343.cms
[2] CBSE v. Aditya Bandhopadhyay, (2011) 8 SCC 497
[3] Debayan Roy, Electoral Bonds Explained: Why is the Scheme So Controversial This Poll Season, News 18 (APRIL 12, 2019, 10:56 AM IST) https://www.news18.com/news/politics/what-are-electoral-bonds-decoding-the-controversy-2099769.html
[4] Bureau, Foreign funding of political parties after 1976 exempted from scrutiny, The Hindu BusinessLine (March 15, 2018) https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/news/national/foreign-funding-of-political-parties-after-1976-exempted-from-scrutiny/article23263844.ece
[5] MM Ansari, Is the Modi Government Hiding More Than What It Is Revealing With the RTI Act?, The Wire (19 December, 2017) thewire.in/government/modi-government-hiding-revealing-rti-act
