As I understand, there is now an ongoing effort world-wide to expand the market for information technology. If every State in India enacts the Right to Information Act, and following such enactment, people's consciousness and demand for information be raised, then the Information Technology shall have a big market in India. This is perhaps the hidden agenda behind the current spate of debate and deliberations on Right to Information across the country.
As representatives of the public, we are mostly concerned with the question, whatever may be the reasons behind the right to information movement, how far its enactment in our State is going to affect the public interest ?
First of all, as Justice Misra pointed out, the category of the Competent Authorities under the Act should be confined only to Government agencies.
As you might know, whenever a road is constructed, a board should as per the existing rule, be there displaying the amount of money spent and the duration of time taken for the said construction. Suppose it is mentioned that Rs.50,000/- has been spent after a road, but how to ascertain that it is Rs.50,000/- or Rs.10,000/- or even Rs.5,000/- , that has been actually spent? When such a controversial situation arises, a verification is usually made by an agency of the Government. In fact no other agency can conduct such verification. So the Government agency alone should be held accountable for providing information to the public.
If we bring farm, society, company, cooperative and all such private organisations into the purview of the Right to Information Act, there should be a great mess, since each type of private organisation is governed separately by their respective Acts, which may not permit the disclosure of information to be made by such private organisations.
Once we had been to the office of a company, to see the utilisation of the loan that they had taken from the OSFC. They only gave us two pieces of paper, which in essence informed that, so much of loan was sanctioned to them, and so much utilized, but the work could not progress due to lack of raw materials. Moreover the proprietors of the said company requested us, "Please recommend our case, so that the OSFC can grant further loan to us, so as to enable us to complete the project."
So when this is the state of affairs in private organizations, how can we expect them to provide information to the citizens in a proper and systematic manner. In view of this, I suggest to take only Government agencies as Competant Authorities under the Right to Information Act on an experimental basis to start with. We should not dilute our objective behind the Right to Information Act by bringing in NGOs , Cooperatives and the like as Competent Authorities under the purview of the Act.
In order that the Right to Information Act be properly implemented, I would strongly suggest that the scope of Competent Authorities should be narrowed to Government agencies only, and the Government should bring out a clear notification of such authorities along with the Act.
I fully endorse the view that the public have a right to know how much money is spent after a development project. But our public are such that they don't know the fundamental rights guaranteed to them in our Constitution, like freedom of speech and expression, which imply the right of the public to know. There is also neither any effort made by any quarter to let the public know about the constitutional rights. Even after the right to information is enacted into a law, we cannot expect much change to take place. Only one benefit shall be derived i.e. any citizen can go to any office and ask for any official information, which the Competent Authority shall be compelled to furnish. Now when an ordinary person goes to a public office and asks for a piece of information, he/she immediately hears the retort, "Who are you? Are you a Sarpanch or a Chairman, an MLA or a Tahasildar? Why should we give you official information? Justice Misra in his speech rightly spoke at length about this predicament of common man while he approaches a public office. I do also strongly feel that a common villager all alone by himself can not afford to extract information from any public office. And a Government officer is habituated to think and say, "If somebody is just a common man, he or she need not know anything about the public matters".
In such a situation, the right to information if enacted in our State, shall be a great source of relief for the common man in accessing information relating to his village development or any other public matter of day-to-day significance.
But I have the apprehension that right to information even if made into a law, shall suffer from tardy implementation by the existing bureaucratic regime, as has been the case with so many progressive legislations in the past.
You might know about the establishment of Lokpal in our State. Even after the Lokpal Act was made, it took quite a long time, about a year in deciding who would be the Lokpal. Again there was delay in gazette notification of the same. Even if a good law like Right to Information is enacted, there is every likelihood that it would suffer the ill-fate as the Act on Lok Pal Bill.
We should bear in mind that the proposed Right to Information is not meant to serve the information needs of we, the politicians or well-off and educated people for that matter. As a matter of fact, being privileged people as we are, we do get what's ever information we want fromr any public office by applying whatever means, be it bribe, flattery or any other shrewd means. Even one can get information about the defense strategy of the country or about a case under adjudication in High Court or Supreme Curt by applying such means. So the Right to Information should now be framed in such a way as to benefit a common man who is poor, illiterate and publicly unknown.
As regards the provision for State Council for Right to Information, I bear the same apprehension as in case of Lok Pal. The appointment of Members and Chairman from various walks of life and thereon its notification in the gazette- all this is likely to procrastinate the implementation of the Act.
If by chance the Government which enacted the law falls down, the new Government that would succeed thereafter might not accept the composition of the State Council as decided by their predecessor government. They might hav4e to go through the same process all over again. From this, you can well imagine, what would happen to the implementation of the Act. In veiw of this, my suggestion is that there should be a statutory provision for fixing of the tenure of the State Council and also a clear-cut provision in the Act itself specifying the duration within which the composition of the State Council should be finalised.
If we do not plug the loopholes in the Draft Bill right from its inception, the proposed Right to Information Act is going to be another fiasco like the Electricity Reform Bill, about which all of you know. The right to information shall be enacted sooner or later in Orissa, as some State of India have already done. But if the Act is not formulated in a proper and realistic manner, it would serve only the interested lobbies of information technology market.
As you know, the World Bank had sanctioned as much as sixty thousand crores of rupees to Orissa for re-construction of the National Highway. Since they found that our National Highway as it existed then, was not suitable for plying of sophisticated vehicles. With the right to information being made into a law, there is no guarantee as such that our people will be benefited thereby, though as a natural fall-out of this enactment, the business lobbies of the information technology market would be definitely benefited.
We don't know, how far the present government is going to accept the amendments suggested here. But if the Government mean business, it will be worthwhile on their part to accept the suggestions for amendment proposed here.