New laws to get around Right To Information act

India's transparency law - the Right To Information Act - will not change but the government wants to restrict its applicability to some areas of sports and nuclear safety through other laws. Chetan Chauhan reports.Unsporting exemptions?

Updated on: Oct 17, 2011, 01:14:23 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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India's transparency law - the Right To Information Act - will not change but the government wants to restrict its applicability to some areas of sports and nuclear safety through other laws.

Prime-Minister-Manmohan-Singh-lights-a-lamp-as-Sonia-Gandhi-looks-on-ahead-of-the-burning-of-the-effigy-of-the-Ravana-during-Dussehra-in-New-Delhi

Two new draft laws - the National Sports Development Bill and the National Nuclear Safety Authority Bill - have specific provisions prohibiting disclosure of information in addition to the exemption clauses already in the RTI law.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had on Friday wanted a "critical look" at the exemption clauses and examination of possible changes in the light of whether they serve "the larger (public) good".

Law minister Salman Khurshid on Sunday ruled out any changes in the RTI law after the PM's statement evoked strong reactions from National Advisory Council member and RTI activist Aruna Roy.

The draft law prepared by the sports ministry - after the cabinet asked it to "re-cast" the bill last month - proposes that some crucial information be withheld from applicants under the RTI law, which the government had wanted to apply to sports bodies, including the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI). These relate to selection of sportspersons, their performance and injuries.

International Cricket Council president Sharad Pawar, who is also agriculture minister, and his cabinet colleagues, renewable energy resources minister Farooq Abdullah and heavy industries minister Praful Patel had objected to the application of the RTI law to cricket.

"The BCCI and sportspersons apprehended that providing such information may give a competitive edge to rivals and also create bad blood among competing sportspersons," sports minister Ajay Maken told HT.

He also explained that the objective of making the RTI law applicable to sports federations was to bring about administrative and financial transparency.

"Without making any compromise on the issues of transparency and good governance, we have tried to accommodate the genuine concerns of the BCCI and other sports federations," Maken said.

The draft law, which will soon be submitted to the cabinet for consideration, also prohibits seeking information regarding doping tests conducted on players and their whereabouts, as objected to by the BCCI.

With these changes, the ministry believes it will be able to get the cabinet's nod to place the legislation in Parliament.

The government also intends to amend the RTI law to exempt the proposed nuclear energy regulator - the National Nuclear Safety Authority - from the ambit of the transparency law.

The draft nuclear safety authority bill approved by the cabinet intends to list the authority among government bodies such as the Central Bureau of Investigation, which are to be taken out of the purview of the transparency law.

In addition, the bill seeks to amend the RTI law to prevent seeking of information on the grounds of "the larger public interest".

The RTI law provides for waiving exemption clauses if there is evidence to claim that providing information would be in the public interest.

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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