Bureaucracy to get more transparent, soon

Voluntary disclosure by public servants for citizen services would soon be the way the government runs its schemes and evaluates bureaucrats. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Jun 12, 2011, 22:24:27 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Voluntary disclosure by public servants for citizen services would soon be the way the government runs its schemes and evaluates bureaucrats.

Consensus emerged between Central government officials and civil society members at a recent task force meeting for making transparency a part of bureaucrats’ annual performance. Government funds will be released only if public disclosure conditions are met and transparency is adopted as criteria for appraisals.

The government is required to make suo motto disclosure under Secton 4 of the Right to Information Act, but even six years after its enforcement, it is yet to come out with guidelines to enforce the provision.

“I agree that implementation of the suo motto disclosure was weak,” said Rajiv Kapoor, joint secretary in the Department of Personnel and Training—responsible for monitoring the transparency law—at a meeting held to discuss ways to implement Section 4 of the Act. A task force to implement the Section was constituted in May.

After its first meeting, it appears the government wants to become more transparent. Kapoor emphasised on the need to have comprehensive guidelines and said it should cover areas where information needs to be provided and in which form.

Apart from making transparency an integral part of governance delivery mechanism, there was also an agreement in the task force that seeking public consultation on any policy or legislation should be a must before finalising it.

To make this happen, the task force will come out with templates on what kind of information can be provided for seven services such as public distribution system, primary schools, heath and pensions.

Civil society members, however, wanted that the information should be provided on a weekly basis to make babus more accountable which many officials believed may not be possible.

Venkatesh Nayak of NGO Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative said the new initiative can make a difference only if the change takes places at the ground level, where the information is generated. And, the example he gave was of a dedicated website for below poverty line families. “If the website has details of the marks citizens get during a BPL survey, the number of RTI applications will come down rapidly,” he said.

As of now, except for National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, voluntary disclosure of information is not part of any other government scheme. This can change in the 12th plan with the government wanting to incorporate the provision of social audit, that makes voluntary disclosure a must for each scheme.

“The second installment should only be released if the state government had proactively provided information,” said Nayak, member of the task force.

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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