People using the proposed Freedom to Information law in Pakistan would get legal protection, unlike India, where authorities haunt regular information seekers, reports Chetan Chauhan.
Whistleblowers using the proposed Freedom to Information law in Pakistan would get legal protection, unlike India, where authorities haunt regular information seekers.
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The new draft Freedom of Information Bill, 2005 has a special provision to protect information seekers who expose corruption while using the law, said Mukhtar Ahmad Ali, executive director, Centre for Peace and Development Initiatives, Pakistan.
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In India, Right To Information (RTI) activists, like Mujibur Rehman, who exposed irregularities in the Prime Minister’s Relief Fund, have been under attack from authorities. In Uttar Pradesh, RTI activists have even been jailed for seeking information from the police.
Magsasay award winner Arvind Kejriwal said instances of the government harassing RTI activists are innumerable. “It is because there is no protection under the law for information seekers,” he added. There is only a government resolution to protect whistleblowers.
Another Magsasay award winner Aruna Roy, who is also an RTI activist, said fear of exposure of wrongdoings makes government officials hostile towards information seekers. Both Kejriwal and Roy agreed the RTI Act should provide legal safeguards to whistleblowers, like Pakistan has done.
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Pakistan's draft Bill, to be affective soon, gives the office of the ombudsman — the final authority in implementation of the law — the power to ask the government to provide protection to information seekers. The RTI Act provides no such powers to the Central Information Commission.
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Pakistan's draft Bill, to be affective soon, gives the office of the ombudsman — the final authority in implementation of the law — the power to ask the government to provide protection to information seekers. The RTI Act provides no such powers to the Central Information Commission.
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Ali told HT Pakistan’s law was inspired from the RTI Act, as it allows file notings to be provided to citizens. “Our earlier Freedom to Information Ordinance, 2002 exempted file notings and minutes of meetings from disclosure. Considering the success of the RTI law in India, the draft allows disclosure of file notings,” Ali said.
Unlike India, where grassroots people seek information under RTI, use of Pakistan’s Freedom to Information Ordinance is limited to NGOs and activists.
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Along with Pakistan, the success of RTI has helped Nepal and Bangladesh draft laws on a similar pattern. In Nepal, the law was notified last year but is yet to be made effective. In Bangladesh, it was notified in October.
“We had even called Central Information Commissioner Wajahat Habibullah for consultations. We took a lot of things from the Indian law,” said Sahin Alam, a member of the law drafting committee in Bangladesh.
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.
