NEW DELHI: 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 US 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. —Dawn/IPS News Service