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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Reporting & Essays |
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Reportage |
Dangerous Knowledge
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| Can India’s landmark Right to Information Act ever live up to its promise? |
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Published : 1 January 2011 |
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PHOTOGRAPHS BY SAMI SIVA |
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| Shashidhar Mishra’s picture garlanded in a niche at his
former home in Phulwaria.
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| O |
N THE EVENING of 12 February
2010, Shashidhar Mishra returned
to his village, Phulwaria, after another
day spent selling biscuits and
sweets on the roads of Begusarai
district in northern Bihar. The broken
roads in the village were badly
lit, but Mishra knew the place so
well that the bicycle he dragged, loaded with his wares,
lacked a headlight. As
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Mishra approached the small bylane leading to his house, however, a power cut cast the road into darkness.
Some 200 metres away Mishra’s brother, Mahinder, lit
a candle to attend to a final customer at his small grocery
shop. A few minutes later, a long-bearded sadhu entered
the shop. “I stumbled upon a body outside your house,” the
sadhu whispered in his ear. Mahinder bolted from the shop,
leaving his customer behind. He ran by his instincts—rushing
past a cluster of shops, turning swiftly through the narrow
lanes, jumping over an open drain—and arrived at his
doorstep to find his brother dead on the ground, blood still
seeping from his head.
“It was a pistol shot,” Mahinder told me when I visited
Pulwaria in October. The identity of Shashidhar’s killer
remains unknown, and Mahinder believes the police
have failed to pursue the investigation. Mahinder, a dark-skinned
man in his 20s with a stiff face and dense stubble,
has little faith the murder will ever be solved—the village’s
politicians and pradhans, he told me, have taken no interest
in the case. As we spoke, Mahinder’s mother, Sushila Devi,
squatted nearby on the floor, leaning against the damp wall
of their mud house. At her hip she held Shashidhar’s 14-
month-old son, who played with a corrugated key dangling
from her neck like an amulet.
This, Mahinder believes, is literally the key to his brother’s
murder: it opens a room where the family has stashed
a dozen Right to Information (RTI) applications filed by
Shashidhar shortly before his death. His final inquiries,
they tell me, were directed to the local police.
Shashidhar Mishra, a compact 32-year-old who spent his
entire life in Pulwaria, worked as a street vendor, bicycling
to nearby villages to sell biscuits and chocolates; his family
and neighbours remembered him as a sharp-witted man
who was renowned for his command of written Hindi, despite
having failed to complete middle school. Before setting
out on his rounds every morning, he stopped at the District
Magistrate’s office to deposit an envelope at the public
information counter—question after question addressed to
the district’s bureaucrats and administrators.
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Anita Devi, Shashidhar’s widow, holding their 14-
month-old son in her house. |
In 2005, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government
introduced India’s first Right to Information Act, an
anti-corruption measure that was intended to provide citizens
access to records and documents kept by local and central
authorities. Applicants submit questions attached to a simple form—to request, for example, that the government
prove that the money allotted to national welfare schemes
has been properly spent—and the relevant agency is obliged
to provide answers.
The RTI law gave hundreds of millions of Indians the
ability to hold the country’s vast bureaucracy to account,
and, it was hoped, to arrest the endemic corruption in its
ranks. Prior to 2005, government documents and records
were covered by the Official Secrets Act 1923, inherited
from the Raj, whose protections were often misused to hide
evidence of bribes, kickbacks and nepotism. The RTI law
had been a central plank of the Congress campaign in the
2004 general elections, and its passage, after a decade of
agitation by good-government activists, appeared at first to
herald a new era of transparency and accountability. The
law’s impact was felt almost immediately, by low-ranking
bureaucrats and top national officials alike: Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh disclosed his assets and those of his cabinet
ministers in response to an RTI application.
Shashidhar Mishra filed his first RTI application in
2008—by the time he died, Mahinder told me, he had submitted
more than 1,000. His inquiries usually concerned
issues troubling the villagers of Pulwaria: he sought information
about how his panchayat spent its funds; he asked
local health officers to explain why their dispensary lacked
basic medical supplies; he asked the police to explain how
they dealt with the vehicles recovered from thieves. One
of Mishra’s applications led to the removal of an illegally
constructed dairy stall at the Begusarai railway station;
another, according to an account in a local newspaper, exposed
a local mafia that sold contaminated water in mineral
water bottles.
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Mahinder Mishra (left) showing Shiv Prakash Rai the
RTI applications filed by his slain brother Shashidhar. |
Mishra’s inquiries were wide-ranging, directed at local
contractors, pradhans, politicians, bureaucrats and police.
As word of his RTI applications began to spread, other villagers
sought his help in filing their own applications, waiting
along his bicycle route to ask his advice and assistance.
In the course of his own applications, Mishra had become well-versed in the workings of local government, and
shared this information freely with anyone who asked: villagers
soon began to call him ‘Khabri Lal’—the newsman.
Mahinder Mishra feels certain Shashidhar was killed
for his attempts to hold local powers to account: after the
murder, Mahinder told me, the police “searched the house
and seized most of the RTI forms.” “The electricity goes
off, the killers shoot at him, and the gunshot is not heard,”
Mahinder said. “How can I accept there isn’t any powerful
hand involved?”
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N 27 JANUARY 1996, a raid on a government office in southern Bihar uncovered evidence of
what was—at least by the now-quaint standards
of 15 years ago—one of India’s most shocking
corruption scandals, the Bihar Fodder Scam. For more than
20 years, a series of state officials from multiple political
parties, in coordination with dozens of senior
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bureaucrats, had siphoned off an estimated ten billion rupees from the treasury by fabricating vast numbers of imaginary livestock and stealing funds allotted for their care and feeding. The scam, which landed the then Bihar Chief Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav in jail—albeit briefly—revealed a crooked nexus of politicians, senior bureaucrats and businessmen, and triggered a widespread national debate on corruption.
The Fodder Scam, splashed across the headlines month
after month, lent new momentum to an existing movement
of activists and advocacy groups for transparency in local
governance. The National Campaign for People’s Right to
Information (NCPRI) was formed by a group of activists,
lawyers, journalists and academics later that year, and produced
a draft Right to Information law that was sent to the
Bharatiya Janata Party-led government—which declined
to act on the proposal for four years, and eventually signed
a very weak Freedom of Information Act only in 2002,
though the NCPRI successfully pushed for state-level RTI
Acts in Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and several
other states.
When the Congress party retooled its campaign platform
for the 2004 general elections—reverting to the old party
slogan, Congress Ka Haath Aam Aadmi Key Saath (Congress
is with the common man)—it promised the introduction of
a more ‘progressive, participatory and meaningful’ Right
to Information act. To draft such legislation, the Congress
president, Sonia Gandhi, turned to Aruna Roy, a Magsaysay
Award-winning activist who had spearheaded some of the
first local RTI efforts in Rajasthan in the early 1990s. Roy
joined the newly created National Advisory Council, which
produced a new draft RTI law at the end of 2004.
But the path to the passage of a robust RTI Act was far
from over: even under the auspices of a friendly government,
the bill met opposition from the Law Ministry, which
stripped the proposed legislation of numerous key elements
before returning it to parliament—limiting its scope to the
national government, for example, and eliminating the provision
for penalising officials who refused to provide information
requested by the public.
Roy confronted Sonia Gandhi over the crippled bill—and
threatened to resign from NAC if it was passed in its weakened
form. She sought similar assurances from Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh, who assured Roy that he would
support the original draft.
After Singh’s intervention, a parliamentary committee
reviewed the bill and proposed 187 recommendations to
restore strength to the law, which was then re-introduced
in parliament. After 15 minutes of discussion, the House
agreed on all but one of the amendments, rejecting the stipulation
that information commissioners would have only
30 days to respond to each request for information; instead,
the commissioners, who have power to impose penalties
on recalcitrant officials, were given an unlimited amount
of time to handle appeals. On 12 October 2005, the law was
passed in parliament to great fanfare. Manmohan Singh
claimed that the RTI Act would herald the beginning of a
new era and “eliminate the scourge of corruption.”
Five years later, it’s safe to say that the scourge of corruption remains, perhaps more powerful than ever.
“This law has faced tough resistance right from the beginning,”
said Arvind Kejriwal, an activist who helped lead the
movement for RTI. “Every party and every bureaucrat has
tried to weaken this law. They don’t want to give up their
power to hide information from the public.” A former civil
service officer who resigned from his post at the income tax
office to protest the rampant corruption he saw there, Kejriwal
received the Magsaysay Award in 2006 in recognition
of his contribution to the RTI movement and his work
against corruption. “By passing the law,” he told me, “politicians
have dug their own graves. They know it, and they
are finding ways to weaken it.”
| T |
HE IMPACT OF THE RTI ACT was felt almost immediately.
At the 2009 national RTI convention, held
in New Delhi’s Vigyan Bhawan, the audience was
repeatedly moved to tears by the stories of poor
farmers, low-wage workers and other previously powerless
individuals who had used the law to demand accountability
from local authorities. |
The story told by Kunal Mochi, a low-caste cobbler from
Sammanchak village in Patna district, was among the more
striking—but hardly unique. Two years ago, Mochi had
filed a complaint against the owner of a local farm with the
police for non-payment of wages. The police ignored him,
but with the help of an RTI activist, Mochi filed an application
and the police were compelled to investigate his case.
When the landowner was found to be in violation of labour
laws, Mochi was paid his overdue wages in a matter of a
week. “He even said sorry to me,” Mochi said, fighting back
tears while standing on stage. For a moment the hall went
silent—one of many such moments, when it was clear that
the RTI Act had the potential to change the lives of millions
of voiceless and powerless Indians. When Mochi, a young
man still in his 20s, walked back to his seat, the audience
erupted in applause.
For Mochi and thousands like him, the RTI Act has been
life-changing. “It is not only about the right to know,” an
activist named Subhash Chandra Agrawal told me. “The
meaning has changed: it means a right to live now.”
Agrawal, a compactly-built man in his 60s from Old Delhi,
holds a Guinness world record for having written more than
30,000 letters to Indian newspapers. But after 32 years of
scribbling paper missives to the media, many of them concerning
instances of official corruption, he learned about
the RTI Act and began filing applications instead—more
than 1,000 so far, he says.
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Subhash Chandra Agrawal, who challenged the Supreme Court
judges to declare their assets, at his office in Old Delhi. |
In late 2008, Agrawal raised a constitutional question: he filed an application with KG Balakrishnan, the former Chief
Justice of India, asking whether the judges serving under
Balakrishnan in the Supreme Court had disclosed their assets,
as was required by an earlier judicial resolution. The
Chief Justice refused to provide an answer. Agrawal won
an appeal at the Central Information Commission, only to
have the Supreme Court challenge the decision in the Delhi
High Court, where Agrawal prevailed once again.
In the meantime, Agrawal’s application triggered a nationwide
debate on the RTI Act and its applicability to the
Supreme Court. For weeks on end the battle was front-page
news in India’s largest newspapers, and the RTI law became
a prominent subject of discussion among Delhi’s elite.
It was clear, by this point, that the law had made a substantial
impact: in its first three years, more than two million
applications were filed. Post offices even reported shortages
of ten rupee stamps—which are used to file applications
by Speed Post—because of the volume of RTI activity.
But the law remains under pressure from all sides: the
government has discussed a number of amendments that
would weaken the act, though the growing community
of activists has successfully raised a public uproar and
prevented their passage. The real threat to RTI, however,
comes not from further legislative action but from the
failure to uphold the law’s requirements: the RTI Act has
empowered citizens to ask questions of their government,
but it has done little to force officials to comply with those
requests, and the state information commissioners—often
themselves former bureaucrats—have made little use of the
provisions to levy fines against lower-level officials.
All this might have been expected at the time of the law’s
introduction: a culture of corruption cannot be reformed in
five years. What was not anticipated, however, was the rising
volume of threats against RTI applicants and activists.
The murder of Shashidhar Mishra was the second killing of
an RTI activist in 2010, following the high-profile death of
Satish Shetty, who was killed in Pune in January after exposing
a series of land scams in Maharashtra. By September
2010, seven more RTI activists had been murdered. At a conference organised by the Central Information Commission
in September, Union Law and Justice Minister Veerappa
Moily broke the government’s silence on the matter
by calling the murdered activists “martyrs,” and promised
that a bill to protect the identity of whistleblowers would
be introduced in the winter session of parliament.
That bill, however, has not yet materialised, thanks in
part to an unprecedented deadlock in parliament: the session
that began in November has been wiped out by an
Opposition protest demanding a Joint Parliamentary
Committee probe to investigate into the biggest scam in a
year already rich with corruption. The so-called 2G scam
began with A Raja, the now-disgraced telecom minister,
who is accused of selling valuable mobile telephone spectrum
at rock-bottom prices to favoured business houses.
But it has blossomed in the public eye into an astonishing
spectacle of moral turpitude, sucking in journalists, politicians
and business leaders, all of whom have been captured
on tape talking to the lobbyist Niira Radia—who has
been depicted by the media as the centre of a vast web of
crooked deal-making.
The income tax department carried out a wiretap on
Radia’s phone during 2008 and 2009, and the tapes—representing
thousands of calls—have leaked slowly into the
public domain, providing an endless diet of titillating evidence
against Radia and her numerous friends and associates.
The business titan Ratan Tata, who appears on one of
the tapes already leaked to the public, has filed a case in
the Supreme Court seeking to block further publication of
their contents on privacy grounds. But Prashant Bhushan, a
lawyer and activist who has filed numerous Public Interest
Litigations aimed at uncovering the extent of the 2G scam,
is adamant that the RTI Act should ensure that the tapes
are indeed made public.
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Manish Sisodia, one of the activists chosen by Aruna Roy to
help draft the RTI Act. |
“Section 8 of RTI says any information related to the public
interest must be made public,” Bhushan told me at his
residence in Noida. “In this case, the recordings reveal all
kinds of illegal and immoral dealings of corporate lobbyists
who influence the decisions of the parliament for their personal
gains.” Bhushan, a soft-faced man in his 50s, is recognised
globally for speaking out against judicial corruption.
“This is a time when people can know how this country is
run by the corporates and their fixers because such highprofile
scams surface rarely.”
The season of scandals that has shaken Delhi’s highest
echelons provides yet another reminder of the need for a
more robust RTI law, even as it underscores the extent to
which the law in its current form has made little impact on
the nexus of corrupt politicians, businessmen and bureaucrats.
In the latest report from the global corruption watchdog Transparency International, India ranks a dismal 87th
on an index measuring perceptions of corruption—not far
from a handful of infamously corrupt failed states like Iraq,
Afghanistan and the Congo.
Activists have pinned their hopes on the RTI Act, but it’s
clear that the mere existence of the law is an insufficient
deterrent to government corruption: it has been crippled all
too easily by ineffective information commissioners, evasive
bureaucrats, and an overall lack of support and political
will from the Centre.
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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gaurav khandelwal
12 March 2011
09:18 AM
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The flaws in the RTI that have been revealed must be dealt accordingly
Also campaigns must be carried out in schools, colleges, and at panchayat
level to make people aware
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Ramanathan
28 February 2011
02:44 PM
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This is brilliant. From murders to background to the current issues, all the elements have been covered. Good luck Caravan!
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ramesh
12 January 2011
12:21 PM
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very good write up. i think i want to have some parts of this story for my upcomming film? kindly let me know.thanks.
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Nichiket
7 January 2011
07:53 PM
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Brilliant article. The people in the story are common people and these are the ones the media should focus on rather than giving space to politicians and bureaucrats. Thanks for such a well-written, well-reported article.
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Arun
6 January 2011
12:12 PM
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Dear Editor.,Thanks for comming up with such a detailed narrative. I enjoyed the story very much. But I think the most important element on RTI corruption is missing in the stroy that is how politicians are backing the bureaucrats to hide the information. Would have loved to read about this aspect. Cheers!
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Vasundhara
2 January 2011
12:33 PM
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Powerful narrative.It gives a detailed outlook. Would have loved to read more on lok pal bill though. but still i must say the piece is really good.
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