Prime Minister wants relook at RTI 'grey areas'

The debate over the need for changes in the six-year-old transparency law got more intense on Friday, with the PM calling for a relook at "certain grey areas" in the RTI act and civil society opposing any change without "credible evidence". Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Oct 15, 2011, 01:33:11 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The debate over the need for changes in the six-year-old transparency law got more intense Friday, with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh calling for a relook at "certain grey areas" in the RTI act and civil society opposing any change without "credible evidence".

Top official of an umbrella body of public sector units took the debate a step ahead, saying the Right To Information was hurting the Indian growth story.

"Gross domestic product (GDP) would have grown by another 2% if there would have been no RTI delays," UD Choubey, director-general of standing conference of public enterprises (Scope) said, without explaining how the figure had been arrived at.

The act had been effective but there were "concerns that it could discourage honest, well-meaning public servants from giving full expression to their views" fearing distortions, the PM said in his inaugural address at a conference celebrating six years of the watershed law.

"…we must take a critical look at it (RTI). There are concerns that needed to be discussed and addressed honestly," he said. He, however, said he was not if favour of diluting the law.

RTI applications on issues not of public interest and aimed at burdening government resources were identified as another area of concern by Singh, whose government enacted the law in 2005.

He said the law should also deal with privacy issues. The RTI act doesn't clearly prohibits applicants from seeking private information about a public servant.

The government should present "credible evidence" to back its claims, said Aruna Roy, a member of the National Advisory Council.

"RTI should get constitutional validity and all laws should be tuned to meet RTI goals," she said.

Corporate sector and non-government organisations should also be covered by the act, said Scope's Choubey, adding corruption was "not monopoly of the government".

The BJP accused the PM of trying to dilute the RTI act.

"Is the government now scared of the RTI act?" spokesman Rajiv Pratap Rudy said.

Roy's National Campaign for People's Right to Information said Team Anna, too, was against any changes without "sufficient reason".

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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