Twenty-one years ago, on October 12, 2005, the Right to Information (RTI) Act came into force, giving every Indian citizen the legal right to question the state. The law grew out of a movement that began in the villages of Rajasthan, where the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) held public hearings to compare official records with what villagers knew from the ground.
Two decades on, the law is under strain. The 2019 amendments gave the Centre control over the tenure and salaries of information commissioners. Several commissions have faced vacancies and backlogs, and activists say the Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDA) threatens the transparency regime.
In an interview with HT, RTI activist and MKSS co-founder Nikhil Dey speaks about what the law meant when it was won, how far it has been weakened, and what must happen next. Edited excerpts:
The RTI movement grew out of villages and public hearings in Rajasthan. What did it mean for the people to gain that right, and does it still matter today?
It came out of villages and rural and semi-urban areas. It came out of poor people’s questions, and it became something everyone uses. That is significant. It became potent when we took it into the public domain. When someone puts information obtained through RTI in the media, it has an almost chemical effect. Otherwise, it sits at home with you. When you make an exposé public with proof, that combination creates impact, much as investigative journalism does. When we started village-based public hearings, it showed that if you make information transparent, anyone can use it, especially those with the greatest stake.
Look at the Mela we held recently in Beawar to mark the anniversary of the law. Rural women turned up in hundreds, defending RTI with a strong understanding of it. People who initially fought for the law were there, as were those who later came to use it. You now have a whole range of people working naturally on transparency and accountability.
In recent years there have been several amendments to the Act. How serious is the damage?
(It is) Serious. The backbone of the law is the information commissions, and many have vacancies. What has happened through the DPDP Act is a potential killer of RTI. It has made things very difficult.
Yet you have a huge community energised by this law. There is no village, town or mohalla in any city without one or two keen RTI users. That has kept it going. They keep cursing the amendments and saying the law is not working, but they are doing amazing things in creative ways.
Governance has moved online, and so many records are now digital. What is RTI’s relevance in this context?
RTI said that what was hidden under the Official Secrets Act would now be made public. Then governments started digitising information, and as they did, they put it behind admin logins that only officers can see. That is contrary to the RTI Act, which said that as you digitise, you should make information public. “Open data” is a misnomer. The bulk of what matters to citizens is behind logins that a Joint Secretary, Deputy Secretary or BDO can access, but others cannot.
That is why we have pushed to remove admin logins. Take the Jan Soochna portal in Rajasthan, which covers 169 departments and 330 schemes, with government expenditure and transactions disclosed online in real time. It has had about 37 crore visits since 2019 and over 50 crore pieces of information downloaded. Even if a tiny percentage of that would have become RTIs, think of how many RTIs it has prevented, because people get the full audit trail of their applications.
The 2019 amendment gave the Centre control over the tenure and salaries of information commissioners. Commissions face vacancies and backlogs. What is the fix?
First, full and time-bound appointments. Information Commissions are left vacant for long periods. In Rajasthan, there has been no Chief Information Commissioner for some time, and the commission cannot function without a chief.
The amendments made it worse by making commissions far more subservient to the government. We have seen the same debate around the appointment of election commissioners. For information commissioners too, the formula is the Prime Minister, the Leader of Opposition and a Cabinet Minister chosen by the Prime Minister. The bottom line is how independent you make the institution, in appointments and in functioning. They have made it more subservient to the executive, which is terrible.
RTI users have faced threats and assaults, and several have been killed. The Whistleblowers Protection Act remains unimplemented. How can ordinary citizens protect themselves?
It is terrible that the Act has not been implemented. There should be accountability for every attack and every death. If an RTI user is attacked while seeking information or in the follow-up, it should be the state’s duty to not just inquire into that case but audit the entire institution. If someone has been murdered, something is seriously wrong with the whole office. If a sarpanch attacks someone who asks questions about a road, the whole panchayat should be audited by state government auditors. The attack is meant to silence the person, so the response should be to investigate even more, so they know it can cost them much more.
Every attack should get a fact-finding, and every murder should be pursued. Families often fight very lonely battles. Some of these people are as good as martyrs, and they are often forgotten. That more than a hundred, 10 or 15 people have been killed shows how important the law is and how dogged its users are.