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Towards transparancyThe objective of the RTI Act is to make the system more transparent. It did take a long time to evolve, though. The first salvo was fired in 1975, when the Supreme Court, in the Uttar Pradesh vs Raj Narain case, ruled that ‘the people of this country have a right to know every public act’. Raj Narain accused Indira Gandhi, the then Prime Minister of India, of using government employees as election agents, and of other corrupt practices and filed an election petition against her. As the case proceeded, a need for re-checking official documents arose. When the bureaucracy withheld disclosure citing national interest as the reason, Justice K K Mathew replied, “those arguments give no sanction to giving the executive exclusive power to determine what matters may prejudice the public interest.” He further added, “In a government of responsibility like ours, where all the agents of the public must be responsible for their conduct, there can be but few secrets. The people of this country have a right to know every public act. Secrecy can seldom be legitimately desired. The responsibility of officials to explain or to justify their acts is the chief safeguard against oppression and corruption”. 
Getting the Act togetherThe RTI struggle resurfaced in the early 1990s, and can be traced back to the deserts of Rajasthan, where a public interest group, Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), was working with villagers, most of who were daily wage labourers. The group set out to solve the problem of discrepancies in their wages. Official records revealed that people who were dead or who had migrated elsewhere, were still listed as employees. The money that was supposedly being paid to the missing labourers was, of course, filling the coffers of the local officials, corrupt to the core. MKSS began demanding photocopies of all official documents, in a bid to identify more such cases. In 1995, the then Chief Minister of Rajasthan assured that the government was willing to cough up the data, even though nothing moved after that. But now the idea of transparency in the government arena was gaining ground. RTI was being discussed and debated in every forum. In 1996, the Press Council of India prepared and circulated one of the first drafts of the RTI Bill.. Interestingly, it followed a pattern that was set by a group of social activists, lawyers and civil servants at an Institute that trained bureaucrats – the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration. This draft clearly said that any information that can be shared in the Parliament or in the state legislatures is fit to be shared with the public. It also set down penalties for those officials who failed to respond to such demands for information. 
Next, the consumer activist, H.D. Shourie, was appointed by the government to chair a committee that would prepare a draft legislation on freedom of information. The draft law was published in 1997, but failed to satisfy the protagonists. It toned down the standards of disclosure, claimed its critics. It diluted the legislation by stating that the public authorities can withhold ‘information, the disclosure of which would not sub serve any public interest’.However, the civil society was not ready to accept defeat. Driven by public pressure, state legislatures were now adapting the PCI draft legislation and coming up with bills modelled on this version. In 1997, Tamil Nadu became the first state to have its own RTI Act. Goa followed in the same year, while Madhya Pradesh joined the league in 1998. In Karnataka the state irrigation department led the way by disbursing official information on certain occassions, and a state legislation came in 2000. Delhi followed suit in 2001 and Maharashtra and Assam got their state level RTIs in 2002. Jammu and Kashmir enacted it in 2004. At the Centre, things were moving at a much slower pace. A Freedom of Information Act was passed in 2002, but died silently even before the final step of notifying it was taken. However, pressure of public opinion, mobilized very powerfully by activist groups, refused to allow the government to opt out of this one. Eventually, a spruced up version of the 2002 Act, now renamed as Right to Information Act, came into force in 2005. |
