The Modi government’s plan to change information law norms, including a 500-word limit for an application and higher fee, has activists worried who see it as an attempt to dilute the RTI.
One of the new rules by the Modi government says an RTI application should not be more than 500 words but exceeding the limit cannot be a ground for rejecting the request. (Illustration: Jayanto)
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The changes proposed will make information expensive and take online the process of complaint for denying information, shutting out thousands of citizens who do not have access to the internet or are not Net-savvy.
“The intention is clear. The government wants to make getting information difficult as the draft rules empower public authorities more than citizens,” right to information (RTI) activist Lokesh Batra said.
One of the new rules says an RTI application should not be more than 500 words but exceeding the limit cannot be a ground for rejecting the request.
The department of personnel and training has set April 15 deadline for comments on the proposed changes -- the first by the Modi government – that have been put up on its website.
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The proposed norms ask the applicant to bear the postal charge for sending the information sought. As of now, the government foots the bill.
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The proposed norms ask the applicant to bear the postal charge for sending the information sought. As of now, the government foots the bill.
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Enacted in 2005, the RTI is the only law that empowers citizens to question the government, with over 10 million applications filed with the Centre in 2015-16.
The government has come out with a new format for non-compliance of a citizen’s request that bars hand-written appeals.
Appeals will have to be filed online, a move that will make the process difficult for hundreds of Indians, who are poor and barely literate.
Officials will be allowed to file documents to counter claims of false information, which will lengthen the process. At present a citizen can file an appeal within 30 days if denied information. The period is 60 days for incomplete data.
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New norms put on the applicant the onus of sending a copy of the appeal to the information officer, a job which is the responsibility of the official or the department concerned.
If not done, the appeal can be rejected.
First appeal is filed within the department and second is with the central information commission.
Information will also get pricier. Government publications such as the economic survey and National Sample Survey Office data will no longer be available for the RTI fee of Rs 10.
Info seeker will either have to pay the market price of the publication or Rs 2 for photocopy of each page, double the present rate.
The previous UPA government, too, had tried to weaken the RTI but dropped the idea in face of stiff opposition from civil society and Congress president Sonia Gandhi.
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.
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