Right To Know in
http://www.cjr.org/the_kicker/index.php#23997
The New York Times has an interesting summary today of the way that
In January 2009, Ralph Frammolino, a former Los Angeles Times investigative reporter now teaching in
June 28, 2010
Right-to-Know Law Gives
By
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/world/asia/29india.html?hpw=&pagewanted=print
BANTA,
As an impoverished day laborer from a downtrodden caste, she was an ideal candidate for the grant. Yet she waited four years, watching as wealthier neighbors got grants and built sturdy houses, while she and her three children slept beneath a leaky roof of tree branches and crumbling clay tiles.
Two months ago she took advantage of
Ms. Devi's good fortune is part of an information revolution sweeping
But it has now become clear that
The law has not, as some activists hoped, had a major effect on corruption. Often, as in Ms. Devi's case, the bureaucracy solves the problem for the complaining individual, but seldom undertakes a broader inquiry.
Still, the law has become part of the fabric of rural
"The feeling in government has always been that the people working in government are the rulers, and the people are the ruled," said Wajahat Habibullah, the central government's chief information commissioner. "This law has given the people the feeling that the government is accountable to them."
Rajiv Gandhi, a former prime minister, once said that only 15 percent of spending on the poor actually reached them — the rest was wasted or siphoned off.
That figure may have changed in the decades since he uttered it, but few Indians doubt that a good chunk of the roughly $47 billion budgeted this fiscal year to help impoverished citizens is lost.
Jharkhand is an eastern Indian state where corruption and incompetence are rife, fueled by mineral wealth and the political chaos that has gripped the state since it was carved out of the state of
In one village near Banta, a clinic that was supposed to be staffed full time by a medical worker trained to diagnose ailments like malaria and diarrhea and provide care to infants and expectant mothers had not been staffed regularly for years. A local resident filed a request to see worker attendance records. Soon the medical worker started showing up regularly.
The worker, Sneha Lata, an assistant midwife whose government salary is $250 a month, denied that she had been neglecting her post. She said the information law was a nuisance. "Because of this law I have to listen to all these complaints," she said. But with villagers now watching, she dares not miss work.
In a nearby hut, Ramani Devi sewed a blanket for a grandson born nine days earlier. In years past she would have been in the fields, toiling for a handful of change to make ends meet. As an elderly widow, Ms. Devi (no relation to Chanchala Devi) knew she was entitled to a $9 monthly government pension. That may not sound like much, but in a rural village, it is the difference between eating and starving.
Middlemen at the government office demand bribes of $20 to direct applications to the right bureaucrat, and many people ineligible for pensions were collecting them. When a local activist filed a request to find out which villagers were receiving pensions, Ms. Devi, who is a Dalit, formerly known as an untouchable, finally got her pension. Now she proudly shows off her savings account passbook.
Simply filing an inquiry about a missing ration card, a wayward pension application or a birth certificate is nowadays enough to force the once stodgy bureaucracy to deliver, activists here say.
But a more responsive bureaucracy is not necessarily less corrupt.
Sunil Kumar Mahto, 29, an activist in
When he applied to find out what had happened, new money was allocated and the road was ultimately built. But no action was taken against whoever had pocketed the original money.
"The nexus of politicians, contractors and bureaucrats is very strong here," Mr. Mahto explained. "To get action against someone is very difficult."
Some critics wonder if the law is simply a pressure valve that allows people to get basic needs addressed without challenging the status quo. "It has been very successful in rooting out petty corruption," said Venkatesh Nayak of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative. "But our accountability mechanisms are weak, and transparency has no purpose without accountability."
But Shekhar Singh, an activist who fought for passage of the law, said that in a nation recovering from centuries of colonial and feudal oppression, fighting corruption was secondary.
"Our main objective was to empower citizens," Mr. Singh said. "This law has done that — given the people the power to challenge their government. That is no small thing."
Hari Kumar contributed reporting.
January / February 2009
Opening
The world's largest democracy finally has an FOI law—so why have journalists been slow to embrace it?
By Ralph Frammolino
http://www.cjr.org/betablog2/feature/opening_india.php?page=all&print=true
In October, community activists from around
Dissatisfied with the pace of police investigations, a number of Muslims filed public-records requests to track the progress of their cases. Their scrutiny pressured police into arresting one hundred suspects.
Nikhil Dey, one of the champions of the law, choked up when he took the microphone to comment. "I'm sorry," he said, bringing his hand to his face.
"Don't be," came a voice from across the hushed conference room. "We should all have tears in our eyes."
Dey regained his composure and explained to fellow advocates why the
There's no denying the emotional impact and political potential of
Born of a decade-long, Mahatma-like protest movement staged by peasants, the act, which took effect in 2005, has unleashed a surge of civic engagement in the world's largest democracy. In the first three years, citizens have filed hundreds of thousands of requests with federal, state, and local agencies, shaking out everything from construction budgets and neighborhood maps to school exams and road surveys. Armchair reformers and nongovernmental organizations like Greenpeace have used the law to halt illegal commercial construction, expose embezzlement in poverty food programs, and track the development of genetically modified crops on the subcontinent. They've embarrassed leading politicians for such things as spending public emergency funds on mango festivals and wrestling matches. Most of all, the law is changing the zeitgeist in a society where people have participated in free elections for fifty-six years but have been otherwise shut out of the daily decisions by a notoriously secretive and corrupt government bureaucracy. "The one difference the RTIhas made is that a citizen who used to feel helpless when he approached a government department doesn't feel helpless anymore," says Arvind Kejriwal, an information-law activist and founder of the anticorruption group Parivartan in
What is still unclear, however, is whether the law will live up to its potential as a game-changer by challenging the government's systemic lack of transparency and accountability. Expectations are high for a measure that represents the most sweeping government reform yet in a country that still doesn't require the disclosure of campaign contributions during political races or have a legal framework to encourage and protect whistleblowers. Despite the impressive testimonials and the isolated successes, fundamental change will come slowly, incrementally, and with plenty of setbacks. The information act has pried open the workings of government, instilling a fear in bureaucrats that their movements can now be tracked, but has yet to deliver the larger reforms its supporters envisioned. "Transparency? Yes," says K. K. Misra, chief of the commission set up to oversee the act in southern Karnataka state, which includes the city of
Only 10 percent of
These problems are compounded by the growing mountain of appeals from denied requests, which threatens to overwhelm the system. And the independent state and federal "information commissions" charged with hearing those appeals have been reluctant to fine uncooperative officials. The Central Information Commission in Delhi, which hears appeals involving ninety federal departments and forty-eight ministries and union territories, including the city of Delhi, has assessed penalties in fewer than 4 percent of the 6,400 cases it has considered so far in which fines were possible. Only a third of the 2.2 million rupees, or $46,500, in fines levied has been collected; a small portion of that has been put on hold, either because of new facts or through court appeals of commission decisions. But more than half of the fines are either scheduled to be deducted in installments from officials' paychecks or remain seriously overdue, according to a Central Commission spokesman. The highest-ranking administrator tagged: the joint secretary in the Ministry of Environment & Forests, who was fined twenty-five thousand rupees in December 2007—and still hasn't paid because she's appealing the matter in civil court. The commission concluded she took a "very casual approach" to a subordinate's request for twenty-year-old records relating to a court case the department initiated against him. The joint secretary took eight months to deny his request, then cited a nonexistent exemption in the RTI act to keep the documents secret, the commission found.
Meanwhile, the mainstream Indian press has been tentative at best in its use of the new tool. Reporters for native-language publications, especially those at rural papers with small circulations, have been using the act, but often as a way to keep local officials honest rather than to ferret out stories. The leading English-language newspapers and magazines—the publications that have the most influence on
The right to information act emerged out of a "people's movement" in Rajasthan, a state in western
The issue was, and continues to be, official malfeasance. Billions of rupees disappear from construction and welfare programs. Civil servants and local officials do little without pocketing baksheesh. Transparency International estimates that Indians dole out a collective $4.8 billion in bribes every year for basic services, like filing a police report. In upholding the conviction of a police officer for taking a 3,500-rupee bribe,
Their ranks include the feisty people of the Pali District in central Rajasthan. During the early 1990s, the region suffered through severe droughts. To help stave off famine, the government opened a number of small construction projects so the villagers could earn money to buy food. But when villagers had completed their work and showed up to collect their pay, they were shortchanged. The town official who controlled the money claimed the workers didn't log nearly as many hours as they thought. The villagers demanded to see the timesheets, or "muster rolls." The official refused, saying the rolls were confidential government documents under the 1923 Official Secrets Act, an anti-espionage measure left over from British rule.
As it happened, the irate villagers were members of Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, or the Workers-Farmers Unity Union, which Nikhil Dey and Aruna Roy started in 1990. A small, severe-looking woman, Roy knew the bureaucratic game, having served in the most elite group of civil servants, the Indian Administrative Service, before quitting in 1975 over what she termed its "decadent colonial spirit." She moved to Rajasthan to work directly with the poor. When the grievances over the famine work first bubbled up, the union staged hunger strikes but nothing happened. Let them die, local officials said. That's when Roy and her compatriots seized on access to information as a way of fighting back. They convinced one local official to let them copy muster rolls, including related bills and vouchers for the construction projects. Insiders leaked other records. Then they went from village to village, confirming the information.
What they found was straight out of
In December 1994, Roy and her cohorts convened a public hearing to discuss the findings. More than a thousand villagers, gnarled old men in turbans and women in colorful ankle-length ghaghras, sat under the shade of a borrowed parachute. With town chiefs looking on from a distance, peasants paraded to the mike to testify to the rip-off. After two years and two highly publicized sit-down strikes, Rajasthan officials grudgingly agreed to open all village records to inspection and photocopying. The union's campaign became a phenomenon, with several village officials promising to pay back pilfered funds. Former Prime Minister V. P. Singh showed up at a subsequent hearing and the Brahmins of the national press offered to help. The burgeoning movement also prompted Rajasthan and eight other states to pass right-to-information laws, which spurred other transparency campaigns.
In conjunction with the Press Council of India, Roy and another union co-founder, Shekhar Singh, lobbied Parliament for a national law. The first attempt got enough votes to pass in 2002, but was never enacted due to a technicality. A second bill soon picked up a powerful ally in Sonia Gandhi, the president of the National Congress Party, who fashioned a coalition government after the 2004 elections. The coalition government, called the United Progressive Alliance, committed itself to passing a strong information law and the next year Gandhi pushed it through Parliament.
The information commissions were established to keep requests from getting bottled up in hostile bureaucracies. But as the number of requests mushrooms, the commissions at the federal level and in the larger states have themselves become a bottleneck. The Central Information Commission in
The law's supporters vow to safeguard it, claiming the glut of appeals will subside once agencies have fully embraced the act. Indeed, they gained added influence when one of their own—Shailesh Gandhi, an RTI activist from Mumbai with eight hundred requests under his belt—was chosen to become the new federal information commissioner. He started hearing appeals in mid-September. Activists are also laying plans with federal authorities to establish a national RTI hotline that will allow citizens to place and pay for their requests via cell phone.
During the October gathering of activists,
The media are turning around as well, albeit slowly. English-language newspapers now regularly publish stories brought to them by RTI activists. Some have broken bite-sized exclusives stemming from their own requests. One
__._,_.___
