10 years of RTI Act: 39 activists dead, 275 assaulted, says report

When right to information activist Guru Prasad Shukla was beaten to death by fellow villagers last month, he became the 39th person to lay down his life for exercising the transparency law in its first decade. Another 275 people have reportedly been assaulted or harassed for invoking the law to raise uncomfortable questions before those in power.

Updated on: Jul 8, 2015, 10:09:50 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

Prefer HTon Google

Share via

Copy link

When right to information activist Guru Prasad Shukla was beaten to death by fellow villagers last month, he became the 39th person to lay down his life for exercising the transparency law in its first decade. Another 275 people have reportedly been assaulted or harassed for invoking the law to raise uncomfortable questions before those in power.

The-government-s-delay-in-appointing-a-Chief-Information-Commissioner-means-applicants-turned-away-by-the-PMO-the-cabinet-secretariat-and-the-defence-ministry-won-t-have-their-appeals-heard-obstructing-their-right-to-information-Illustration-Jayanto

The 50-year-old Shukla had sought information about development work in his village and was allegedly killed by village head Triloki Nath Dubey and his relatives in broad daylight. Most other victims, too, suffered for exposing small scams in the countryside by using the law that came into force on October 2, 2005, the 136th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi.

“The RTI law doesn’t provide that the name of the applicant shouldn’t be disclosed by the public authority. As soon as such an application is filed, the identity of the person gets disclosed to those whose interest may get harmed if the information is disclosed,” said Ventakesh Nayak of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, a Delhi-based advocacy group that has collated data on RTI victims.

Under pressure from civil society, the UPA government enacted a law to protect whistle-blowers, including public servants. But, the NDA government did not notify it and moved amendments expanding the list of those exempted, which is being considered by a standing committee of Parliament.

Ajay Dubey, an RTI activist from Madhya Pradesh, who filed public interest litigation in the Supreme Court in October 2014 seeking a CBI probe into the Vyapam scam, said seeking information on any scam always led to harassment and undue pressure to withdraw the application.

In a rare instance in 2011, Bihar police established that 54-year-old Ram Vilas Singh was shot dead in Lakhi Sarai town for asking police why an accused in a murder case was not arrested. He had also filed several other applications seeking information on corruption in the implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), the world’s largest job guarantee programme.

But, the police action happened only after the National Human Rights Commission sought a report from Bihar police. The case witnessed a quiet burial and most of the conspirators were out on bail, Nayak said.

A similar fate was witnessed in the cases of RTI activists such as Niyamat Ansari, who exposed corruption in the MGNREGS in Jharkhand, Amit Jetwa, who sought information on illegal mining in Gujarat’s Gir forest, and Satish Shetty, who attempted to highlight land grabbing in Pune. All three were murdered.

A Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative report shows the effectiveness of the law has been diluted. Around 20% of the posts of information commissioners mandated to ensure speedy redress of grievances of RTI users are lying vacant in states, a marginal increase over the 2014 level.

In five states, information commissions were headless as of June 2015 and the newly carved Telangana was yet to have one. “Most of the state commissions have become parking lots for retired bureaucrats,” an RTI activist said.

Read:

SC notice to parties on petition to bring them under RTI law

If we hobble Right to Information, then we hobble India’s democracy

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

Get the latest India News, breaking headlines and real-time updates from across the country. Stay informed about politics, government policies, crime, weather and major national developments.