Secret meeting on RTI in Mumbai irks activists

A parliamentary standing committee holding consultation on amending the transparency law to keep political parties outside its ambit in a secret manner has irked RTI activists.

Updated on: Oct 23, 2013, 14:33:57 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

Prefer HTon Google

Share via

Copy link

A parliamentary standing committee holding consultation on amending the transparency law to keep political parties outside its ambit in a secret manner has irked RTI activists.

The committee, to whom the RTI Amendment Bill was referred after lot of public heat, held consultations with political parties in a five-star hotel in Mumbai recently without any prior notice to people about the meeting.

The committee had invited only two RTI activists and another two had reportedly gate crashed at the meeting. However, the standing committee asked the activists not to discuss the deliberations without anyone or they would be booked for breach of Parliamentary privilege.

Former central information commissioner Shailesh Gandhi in a letter to chairman of the committee Shantaram Naik said many RTI activists from Maharashtra had sent representations to the committee and requested an opportunity for a personal hearing.

“It would be very unfortunate if such a closed door meeting with two invitees and their two friends is recorded as a public consultation,” he said, asking him to conduct a properly organised consultation to hear view of the citizens in this regard.

The committee has received a large number of representations from citizens across India against the government’s move to amend the RTI Act to exempt political parties from its purview. A representation from Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative says that many nongovernment bodies have already been brought under the RTI Act for substantial funding from the government, the ground to including political parties under the transparency law.

The committee is expected to submit its report to the government before the start of the winter session of Parliament in November-December this year.

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

Follow India news real-time updates and the latest news covered on Hindustan Times, featuring today's critical updates on Sonam Wangchuk LIVE and more across India.