NAC prevails on govt over RTI reforms

After months of bickering, the UPA government has agreed to Sonia Gandhi headed National Advisory Council’s proposed changes in the government’s draft of Right To Information (RTI) rules, except removing the proviso limiting one subject in an application.

Updated on: Mar 25, 2011, 24:53:55 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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After months of bickering, the UPA government has agreed to Sonia Gandhi headed National Advisory Council’s proposed changes in the government’s draft of Right To Information (RTI) rules, except removing the proviso limiting one subject in an application.

The council had opposed the Department of Personnel and Training’s (DoPT) draft RTI rules, which limited the word limit of an RTI application to 250 and prescribed new conditions for rejecting appeals before the Information Commissioners.

Magsasay award winner and NAC member Aruna Roy informed the council that there has been agreement on all issues except on “one subject matter.”

The DoPT still wants that an application should deal with only one issue, which the NAC believes can be misused by the Public Information Officers to reject RTI applications.

It wants a provision in the proposed rules that seeking information on more than one issue should not be a ground for rejection of an RTI application.

“Areas of agreement include, enhancement of word limit from 250 words to 500 words and also to drop the rules relating to abatement of RTI application upon death of applicant,” the NAC said in a statement.

This will protect the RTI activists, who have faced assault and even killed for trying to expose corruption.

The DoPT has agreed to the NAC recommendation that there should be a separate cadre for the Information Commissions and commission’s secretary should be appointed in consultation with the commissioners.

The department also agreed that any appeal with the information commissions would not be rejected on the ground of inadequate documents and the applicant not appearing in person before the commission.

NAC has agreed to the DoPT suggestion that the government should be allowed to charge up to R50 for providing information, if the postage charges are more than R50.

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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