People’s views not reflected in RTI committee report

A day after a parliamentary committee submitted a report recommending the exemption of political parties from the ambit of the Right to Information Act, a civil society body accused the panel of bias, saying the submissions made by citizens were not considered in the right context and made public.

Updated on: Dec 19, 2013, 24:57:06 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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A day after a parliamentary committee submitted a report recommending the exemption of political parties from the ambit of the Right to Information Act, a civil society body accused the panel of bias, saying the submissions made by citizens were not considered in the right context and made public.

“The committee’s chairperson was biased in favour of supporting the amendment proposal and it was clear from his alleged comments during public consultation on the proposed amendments,” said Venkatesh Nayak an RTI advocator who is also associated with the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative.

“I also know for a fact that the submissions of at least two civil society representatives who sent their inputs in a timely manner and one of whom deposed before the Committee do not find mention in the committee’s report,” Nayak said, surprised at the Rajya Sabha secretariat prohibiting people from making their submissions public.

The RTI activists are also surprised that only 15 days’ time was given to them for submission.

The committee, headed by Shantaram Naik, had brushed aside the recommendation of attorney general GE Vahanvati on bringing the parties in the RTI ambit, saying the “laws should not be laid down through a process of misinterpretation of the clear provisions of the law”.

Naik told HT on Wednesday the submissions made by all were considered and it would be wrong to say that the Central Information Commission’s order on bringing the parties in the RTI ambit was correct. “The RTI law nowhere mentions that the parties are covered under the transparency law and we went by the correct interpretation.”

Former central information commissioner Shailesh Gandhi was dismayed at the report and said the committee did not “fairly” put forward the views of civil society and public hearing was not done properly.

“I came to Delhi and made a submission. It is not even reflected in the report. They (the committee) had made up their mind and just went through the motions (of it),” he said, adding that the civil society groups would soon launch a campaign if the political parties tried to push the amendments through in Parliament.

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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