Govt to educate school children about RTI

The day the Central government notified the new rules diluting the Right To Information Act, the HRD ministry decided to tell school children across India that the transparency law was an effective tool to fight corruption and demand good governance, Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Aug 18, 2012, 19:00:33 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The day the Central government notified the new rules diluting the Right To Information Act, the HRD ministry decided to tell school children across India that the transparency law was an effective tool to fight corruption and demand good governance.

The National Council of Education Research and Training (NCERT) has decided to print a RTI message in the textbooks of class VI to VIII saying the law empowers the "citizens and promotes transparency and accountability" in the working of the government and "contains" corruption.

The message to be displayed on the inside page of the back cover of the textbooks is expected to reach aproximately to one crore students in 2012, a year before next general elections.

The message says-- the RTI Act can help in making our democracy work for people in real sense. And, a testimony to it is that about 10 crore RTI applications had been filed with different public authorities across India till 2010, said a study done by Center for Media Studies.

Not just creating awareness, the HRD ministry asked the children to seek information from the government using the tool.

"You can seek necessary information about various activities of the government through an RTI application," the message reads, while detailing the process to seek the information.

Much before the government decided to create awareness, many school children across India have used the RTI Act to get access to their answer sheets and even seek information about the facilities available to them.

Aishwarya Parashar, a class-VI student of the City Montessori School, Lucknow, had stumped the nation when it was discovered through her RTI that the government has not notified Mahatma Gandhi as father of the nation.

The message tells the students that an RTI application can be filed on a plain paper even though several government ministries have prescribed a format for using RTI.

It also says that the RTI application can be send through a post office.

It was the Central Information Commission in 2011 which had asked the HRD ministry to display a message creating awareness about the transparency law and last week the ministry communicated the NCERT’s decision the information watchdog, the day it received the rules diluting the RTI law from department of personnel and training.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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