Promises kept: Celebrating the Right to Information

Yesterday was Republic Day, observed in the shadow of a contentious politics around the Constitution it is supposed to celebrate. Many things have been written about this and in this piece, I want to write about the Right to Information which is one of the rare instances in independent India's history where people have wrested a right from the state and established it in law. RTI is truly the republic (res-entity-publica-of the people) in action--both in its origin story and in how people have used the right. 

Origins

How the campaign for a right to information got started is a story all of us know and rarely remember. Briefly, in 1996, the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) organised a dharna in Beawar, Rajasthan, which went on for 40 days. The people of Beawar supported and sustained the dharna and other organisations joined. The National Campaign for the People's Right to Information was formed at this dharna. 

In retrospect, it is stunning how quickly states first and then the centre adopted laws to institutionalise the right to information. According to the MKSS website, "The NCPRI, has been able to lobby both in the States and at the Centre, and today there are Right to Information Laws have been enacted in the States of Tamil Nadu (1997), Goa (1997), Madhya Pradesh (1998), Rajasthan (2000), Maharashtra (2000), and Karnataka (2000), Delhi (2001), Jammu and Kashmir (2003) and Assam (2003). Citizens pressure from across the country helped bring forth a greatly improved National Bill which was passed by Parliament in 2005, replacing the much weaker Freedom of Information Act passed in 2003. The Right to Information Act (2005) came into effect across the country in October 2005."

The Right to Information

"An Act to provide for setting out the practical regime of right to information for citizens to secure access to information under the control of public authorities, in order to promote transparency and accountability in the workiiig of every public authority, the constitution of a Central Information Commission and State Information Commissions and for matters connected therewith or incidental thereto.

WHEREAS the Constitution of India has established democratic Republic;

AND WHEREAS democracy requires an informed citizenly and transparency of information which are vital to its functioning and also to contain colTuption and to hold Governments are their instrumentalities accountable to the governed;

AND WHEREAS revelation of information in actual practice is likely to conflict with other public interests including efficient operations of the Governments, optimum use of limited fiscal resources and infonnation;

AND WHEREAS it is necessary to harmonise these conflicting interests while preserving the paramountcy of the democratic ideal;

Now, THEREFORE, it is expendient to provide for fumishing certain information to citizens who desire to have it."

The preamble to the Right to Information (2005) Act firmly links the right to democracy, transparency and accountability. It also acknowledges, and therefore, enshrines, limitations on this right in the same text, opening the door to a host of legislative and everyday curbs to its exercise. Like all other rights, the right to information is therefore something that we need to protect through a constant vigilance.

Today, the Central Information Commission and State Information Commissions represent the existence of the act. More importantly, every government department has an RTI desk. There is an RTI portal for the central government and also for each state. But what is useful for the ordinary citizen is that we can also file RTIs via email or through the post office. The portals provide a format but one can also simply write one's request in one's words and the government cannot say, "You did not write the correct words or format." The fee is also minimal.

Exercising the right to information

Ease of use has made the RTI a popular instrument. Satark Nagarik Sangathan reported last year that between July 1, 2023 to June 30, 2024, 231417 RTI petitions were filed across all the Information Commissions. 

People use the RTI to seek information about personal matters (where is my application stuck?) or local concerns (what happened to the road repair that was started 3 months ago and abandoned?). At Prajnya, in our short history, we have used RTI petitions a few times in various ways and with varying degrees of success.

1. Our first petition was filed on November 25, 2009, marking the opening of our 16 Days Campaign against Gender Violence that year. The petition, as I recall, asked a few questions about usage of fund allocations for public safety. It was batted about a few departments and received no reply.
2. In 2016, we tried again. This time, a focused petition asking about the formation of Local Committees (mandated by the workplace sexual harassment law) was sent on to District Collectors. Responses varied. Some phoned to ask exactly what we meant. Some sent us their office Internal Committee details. We followed up with a second set of petitions, this time directly addressed to District Collectors in Tamil Nadu.We were able to compile this information into a publicly accessible spreadsheet. We intended to repeat this exercise in 2024 but it floundered for our own reasons. 
3. Early in 2024, we were part of an RTI effort by women's organisations to seek an update on Tamil Nadu's Women's Policy. We had seen and sent feedback on a draft but the final version had not appeared over a year later. This met with a quick response saying the Policy was almost ready and so it was.

Colleagues in the social sector say they have used the RTI extensively and effectively. This is great news because for ordinary people, access to the administration still retains the quality of a colonial durbar. The gatekeeping is extraordinarily efficient and you will rarely get appointments. You have to sit and wait hours, despite the appointment. After all that, you enter the office, tired and suitably chastened for having the temerity to seek information or assistance and receive a short hearing--courteous if you are lucky--before being dismissed. Most of the time you have to visit multiple times. 

In 18 years, if I had had the patience to visit the darbar regularly, my organisation might have had a higher profile in official circles. As it is, we were content to email relevant information (such as reports) and take our chances. After all, all that patience and deference were still no guarantee that someone would read what we handed them.

In such an administrative culture, where despite the constitutional mandate and the rhetoric, a relationship of patronage persists between the administration as raja and all of us as praja, the RTI is an extraordinarily powerful tool. 

You can seek data--how much money, where is it used, who sits on the Local Committee, how many times has it met. You can ask for updates--what happened to your draft policy? You can nudge officials into doing things they may have forgotten about or not quite understood--this was our experience with the implementation of the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013 at the district level. It seemed that our RTI petition had reminded some that identifying a nodal officer and setting up a Local Committee was part of their work. 

As I was researching this blogpost, I mistyped RTI as rit, and generated information on writ petitions. I would say this is no mistake. The right to information is as powerful a tool as a writ petition for safeguarding all our other rights. It is also much cheaper and easier to exercise--we don't need lawyers, we don't need courts, we don't need anything but a simple letter and a small fee (Rs. 10/-). 

Celebrating the right, commemmorating the movement

Source: The Hindu

In 2016, the April-May 1996 dharna for the right to information was marked with a memorial at Chang Gate, Beawar. In 2024, the foundation stone was laid for an RTI museum--a "living museum," in Nikhil Dey's words--which will showcase history, archive people's experiences with RTI, teach people how to file petitions--in short, be a place where people can learn, do, teach and share. 

We associate museums with things so old we can barely remember them--and in India, to be honest, rarely care about. But an RTI museum, a place of seeing and doing, is an important project, in my view.

First of all, the right to information is integral to the right to life. Think of COVID. All that we did not know and do not know about help we could get or how we could stay safe led to so much suffering. And we still don't know where donation money went, how many people were sick, how many died. Opaque governance protects governments, not citizens. 

Second, the right to information is integral to our right to freedom. We live in a time where any kind of dissent and free speech are at best trolled and at worst, punished with incarceration on trumped up charges. We have the right to know--to fact check, to ask questions, to demand accountability. We have the right to a two-way engagement with government. In democratic India, we are citizens, not subjects, and those in government are our equals. The right to information is an assertion of that equality. 

Third, the movement for a right to information stands out in the history of people's movements because it was effective. As flawed as the various RTI laws may be and as imperfect as its implementation, the fact that a right to information is part of our democratic discourse (and emulated by others) is precious. That we won it, against a global tide of restraints on the freedom of expression and civil society, is something to celebrate and always remember. 

Fourth, new laws, new regulations, new rules incrementally limit our right to ask. If we recall the conflict noted by the RTI Act preamble, the state is now tilting the balance back in favour of secrecy. Where our political culture is herding us into habits of unquestioning obedience and unthinking credulity, a space where we can learn about questioning and challenging is very important. Even using the language of 'duty', where do we get to learn our 'duties' as citizens--to insist on transparency and demand accountability, to go out and vote freely from a slate of candidates who can contest fairly in a level playing field? A living RTI museum, appropriately a project of the School for Democracy, founded by the MKSS, would be such a place. 

I preach citizenship all the time--be a good citizen, be an active citizen. And democracy is as important to me as clean air--I need both and indeed, democracy may be a prerequisite of clean air as we hold our governments accountable for climate justice. I am therefore, happy to support the RTI Museum project in whatever small way I can. If you would like to learn more about the project, this post has several useful links. 

If you would like to support the project financially, you can contribute via this link. The RTI Museum is NOT seeking government or corporate/CSR support. The idea is that the RTI, the right belong to all of us, each of us, and so will this museum So, it will be up to us to imagine the museum, take ownership and to make it a reality. 

Passport to Fury

Where did I spend Valentine's Day? At the Regional Passport Office, Chennai. And the diatribe that follows is the other side of the reluctance to issue visas to scholars from abroad. Please appreciate, however, that it is written in a far calmer tone than I have felt through most of today. (There is an MSN emoticon for what I have felt: it is a little unsmiling head banging against a wall repeatedly.)

Our day

When we got to the Passport Office at 930 (very late, we were told; it opens at 10), the queues stretched out to the gate. People had come there at 4 am, we were told. We went up to see if there was a Senior Citizens Counter (I was with my mother) or at least a place for them to sit. All the seats were taken, and not just by senior citizens or pregnant ladies. We came back down to join the queue for the Tatkal service (which by the way takes a whole day, and don't let your agent or anyone tell you otherwise). My mother sat on a parapet for a while.

We decided to abandon the queue and went to our travel agent and said, "Forget Tatkal, we can wait." He informed me that I had a problematic case and so my best hope of getting a reissued passport was to do this. So what is my problem? Yellow fever? Al Qaeda connection? Visits to Pakistan? Sex change? No, no, worse. I got my passport reissued the last time in.... Chicago. And not in a shady alley--at the Indian Consulate there. I challenged that but knew it was futile.

So back we went. The people who were standing around me at 945, were inside the building now, but only about ten steps ahead of me and halfway to the first floor. The queue took almost two hours to snake up to the point (on the second floor)where tokens were issued. Yes, this was just for tokens!

Picture this. 11 am and it is getting hotter and hotter. People are getting tired and a little dehydrated and thank god this is not Madras' kattri season! Hundreds in the queue but there are no signs, so there is a current of doubt constantly as to whether people are in the right queue. Can you imagine standing like that for several hours, only to find you are in the wrong place? No signs anywhere. An occasional: this is ECNR queue, no? Or, neenga Tatkal-aa (are you Tatkal)? A little flurry of anxious activity. People descend but the queue doesn't move.

My cousin was in another section today. The laminated portion of his passport came off and he just got his new passport. So he is here to get it stuck or re-laminated again. And as he comes down, he says, "They stuck the same one, what if it comes off?" But as to my woes, he shrugs. No point writing, he says. (The agent earlier quoted had tried to reassure me, "Even people from Hindu have to go through this.") Everyone writes. Everyone has written. Nothing changes. And I want to scream: And that is okay? Why do we accept lower standards in governance than we would in the private sector or everyday housekeeping?

(February 16, 2007: My cousin's replacement label has come off. He was back at the RPO today and asked to return another day to meet a superintendent. For some reason, the Nashik Security Press is unable to create adhesive identity stickers.)

I pass the time calling a journalist friend. But even as I speak to her, I know that she will not write about this. She says she will call a friend. I know that her friend will not write about this. My friend says: tell me if you want this done for you. And my point is: so you and I can always call someone and get things done. But what about the other people in the queue?

My mother and I have already passed up a couple of facilitation offers because our conscience will not permit us to walk past people who got up early and came with their entire extended family to wait! My anger is not that I should have it easier, but that this should not be difficult for anyone. After all, the passport is a symbol of that other 'janmasiddha adhikaar'--swarajya. Although today, I have felt like complete moron for having held on to my Indian passport, even to the scandalous point of getting it renewed in Chicago, the fact is this document means something more to me than a way to leave this country.

Like many Indians, I too come from a family where people made sacrifices and conscious choices to fight for the right--our right--my right--to carry this pocket-sized document with "Republic of India." The Indian passport carries, for me, not just a depressing weight of sombre sacrifice but the entire repertory of dreams that we have collectively dreamed for ourselves. When you make it this hard to get or renew a passport, and raise stupid objections like, "But you renewed it abroad!" I can only make two things of it: one, you are insulting my citizenship (and your own passport services elsewhere) and two, you are looking for a bribe (and therefore, insulting my citizenship).

In the course of this day, I realized something. Most of the people I know--people from my class of Indian society, the somewhat educated, just above the middle class--do not go hang out at the Passport Office all day. But "the queue up in a government office" experience is something that most Indians, most South Asians, I daresay, are quite familiar with. I have three complaints that follow from my experience today and I am blogging about this because I think this is so outside the experience of mediapersons, decision-makers and others who can actually make a change that if I don't, it will just go nowhere.

My experience was just tiring and exasperating. Can you imagine what it must be like for people who don't have a way to shorten queues at all? Or who can barely muster together the property and banking papers they need for a first passport, which will be their ticket to doing better in life? What of senior citizens who don't have children to go with them? And really, what a stressful job for the people working in that office facing that massive crush of applicants every single day, all day?

A three-pointed diatribe

First, there are no clear instructions anywhere. It is not clear where the queues end. It is not clear what they are for. It is not clear whether there is any point to the queues at all. Of course, the website is marvelous. But when you ask travel agents, they give you entirely different instructions and then say, "Madam, we know, we do this everyday." Which they do. There are boards with information apropos of nothing in particular. Why can't we have clearly demarcated lines to follow? The effort to improve customer service in every other sector seems to have stopped short of the rationalization of services in the Passport Office. Either we genuinely believe that Indian government officials cannot perform efficiently at all, in any circumstances, so that we wipe the floor with our expectations of good governance, or we really feel obliged to government for any scraps we get and don't feel entitled to complain.

The arguments for rationalization are innumerable; what are the counter-arguments?
Shortage of labour? In India???
Shortage of skilled labour? In India???
Shortage of space? There is a large lawn outside, and space can be created by optimal planning.
Shortage of funds? Money is never really the reason that something doesn't happen, which brings us to shortage of will? And here the board lights up: we have a winner!

Which brings me to my second complaint: Of course, you know and I know that Indians are also very good at not following instructions and will wander off, circumvent the line, move the posts. We crowd at counters. We use cellphones under signs that prohibit them or ask for silence. We have absolutely no civic sense, and no sense of common courtesy. But while we are wild children in wild places like government offices and railways stations (and increasingly, the India-bound gates at Heathrow Airport), we are also models of good behaviour in nice stores like Westside, in good performing arts centres and in the presence of disciplinarian spiritual teachers like Satya Sai Baba.

It seems to me that both administration and citizenry are content with imposing on each other a bar that is so low as to be virtually non-existent. This brings me to my final complaint: around me, people were so accepting of this unacceptable situation. The travel agents we consulted said, "It is like this." When I asked why, they said: "Crowd is too much." But the crowd was arguably larger in the railway booking centres and they have really cleaned up their act. Then they said, "These are the rules." I asked why the procedure had gotten harder when it should have become simpler. Then they said, "Madam, it is like that. You cannot expect your ideas here." But I am from here. I am also an Indian. So I asked, if your travel agency and my office can run efficiently and rationally, why can't this office? No reply. Just a shrug and acceptance. And that is what tips my temper over the edge.

Some of it has to do with the fact that all of us depend on fixers and the rhetoric of changes in governance have far outstripped the ground reality of registrar offices, passport offices and the like. Even if there is no need, builders and travel agents and others who interact with these offices everyday have a well-oiled network of easers and fixers and they do not have enough confidence in the will of the political leadership in the country to initiate and implement genuine reform. So they keep this machine well-greased, and people who ask too many questions slip in the slick.

The media, in India and elsewhere, has been celebrating the citizen journalist all year. I am coming around to the view that this is a fictitious character modeled loosely on a large number of individuals in love with messaging services on their cellphones. That is all. We like to vote and this is even easier than standing in the sun (in another queue) and voting during elections. For the rest, chalega, we are like that only.

Well, I am not like that only. I want to live in a country where the administration seems to think through the regulations it creates, where service-oriented offices are oriented to serve, where the smallest of services can be accessed transparently even before I think about exercise my Right to Information. I am driven, capable, efficient, thoughtful and have a social conscience; I think I deserve a government that is the same way, don't you?