‘With RTI, government employees are now public servants’

If you want to test the effectiveness of a transparency law on good governance, Sweden might be the best place to look. The country was the first to enact a freedom of information law, and now has one of the most transparent administrations in the world, said activist Bhaskar Prabhu, who conducted a series of workshops on India's landmark Right to Information (RTI) Act, organized by the Times of India on Friday.

The origins of the RTI Act in India do not lie in the country's bureaucracy or political classes, but in a people's movement in Rajasthan, where a daily wage labourer asked for records of his salary, said Prabhu, who took his audience through the slideshow on the importance of RTI, as well as the nitty-gritty of using the transparency legislation.

Can all information on governments be accessed through the RTI Act? Are there exceptions to the rule? What sort of information does RTI provide access to? And how can the information be accessed? These are some of the questions that Prabhu tackled in his workshop, which aimed at fostering participatory democracy.

"For those who are below the poverty line, no fee is charged for the information," said Prabhu, who spoke of how people who could not read or write could access information on the basis of oral requests, too.

He also pointed to a clause in the law that makes it mandatory for public bodies to disclose information about themselves on the internet, including their budgets and the facilities they provide to citizens.

The workshop aimed at helping citizens understand the manner in which information could be sought, and the most effective way of making use of the Act. In addition to recent information, RTI can also be used to access 20-year-old government files, said Prabhu.

"Thanks to the Right to Information Act, government employees are no longer government servants but public servants," said Prabhu.

"The workshop has given us a basic knowledge of the Right to Information Act. I now know how to go about understanding the Act. I did not attend the workshop because I have a personal problem but because I had heard a lot about the RTI Act and wanted to learn more about the law," said Vivek Saraf, one of the participants at the workshop.

Many of the participants expected to solve their personal problems through the RTI Act, in the hope that access to information would help them fight the battles in their backyard. Some spoke of neighbours stealing their water pipes while others wanted to know how they could hold their housing societies accountable for not conducting annual general meetings for decades. Among the participants was a retired public sector official, who had earlier been involved in replying to RTI queries. He is now inspired to file some of his own.

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