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EPW articles on RTI

1. Nailing the Himachal Pradesh Government‘s Lies
   

   The Himachal Pradesh government has made a number of false statements on crucial issues affecting the villagers of Gagret in Una district relating to the land that will be acquired for a proposed special economic zone. An airport that is to come up will affect the population of 25 villages, a majority of whom are peasants owning less than one hectare of land.

   --Tikender Singh Panwar--
   Issue: VOL 43 No. 50 December 13 - December 19, 2008


2. Governance and the Right to Information in Maharashtra
   

   Right to Information Act is supposed to ensure transparency in administration and governance. But a survey done by Pragati Abhiyan in Nashik district of Maharashtra finds that many government offices have not yet nominated a public information officer as required under the Act. Often information exists in a raw form, but it is not processed into a consolidated format.

   --Ashwini Kulkarni--
   Issue: VOL 43 No. 35 August 30 - September 05, 2008


3. Auditing the Right to Information Act
   
   Issue: VOL 43 No. 18 May 03 - May 09, 2008


4. Administrative Reforms Commission and Right to Information
   

   The Administrative Reforms Commission?s recommendations on the RTI Act do not seem to be aimed at giving it more teeth. On the contrary, having failed to have in-depth consultation with groups working to promote RTI, it has actually arrived at avoidable conclusions.

   --Shekhar Singh--
   Issue: VOL 41 No. 39 September 30 - October 06, 2006


5. Right to Information: An Amendment Too Soon
   
   Issue: VOL 41 No. 31 August 05 - August 11, 2006


6. Science and the Right to Information
   

   The many streams of human knowledge have been shaped by an interplay of seeking after truth and telling calculated lies. Of these, the folk and classical streams cannot effectively discriminate empirically valid knowledge from beliefs, and have grown slowly. Science is notably an organised enterprise of scepticism, anchoring itself firmly on the bedrock of empirical facts, thereby ensuring that deliberate manipulation of information is quickly exposed and eliminated. Official knowledge, though claiming to be science based, permits itself to be manipulated by vested interests, by discouraging scrutiny. As a result, much of the information base for managing India's environment is incomplete, outdated, or downright bogus. The only way to correct this is to expose it to public scrutiny. The new Right to Information Act makes this possible. The tools of information and communication technology can facilitate such scrutiny by making available all relevant information, in full detail, on a publicly accessible website. Together, these developments present a tremendous opportunity to replace the current bureaucratic "control and command" by a "share and inform" approach.

   --Madhav Gadgil--
   Issue: VOL 41 No. 19 May 13 - May 19, 2006


7. Right to Information Act: Loopholes and Road Ahead
   

   The Right to Information Act empowers the ordinary citizen in a very radical way. However, to be truly effective in ensuring greater transparency and probity in public life, the legislation needs to be used responsibly and judiciously by the public, the respective information commissions and the concerned government departments.

   --O P Kejriwal--
   Issue: VOL 41 No. 11 March 18 - March 24, 2006


8. Right to Information and the Road to Heaven
   

   While the Right to Information Act 2005 empowers citizens to probe the working of their government, certain restrictions in the new law on the kind of information that can be made public are likely to limit the usefulness of this potentially powerful legislation. The ?correspondence? portion of a ?file? ? not merely the ?notes? portion as provided for in the act ? should be open to scrutiny and examination. Also, the appointment of information commissioners is vulnerable to political considerations playing a role. Frequent audits and vigilance will ensure that the citizens? right is not lost in the labyrinth of paperwork.

   --Oulac Niranjan--
   Issue: VOL 40 No. 47 November 19 - November 25, 2005


9. Power to the People
   
   Issue: VOL 40 No. 21 May 21 - May 27, 2005


10. First Priority: Guarantee Employment and the Right to Information
    

    It is a misfortune for both the theory and practice of economic policy in India that we have not yet worked out a coherent scheme about how to take advantage of an expanding domestic market involving the poor and the marginalised in this era of globalisation. The expansion in purchasing power can come from public works financed initially, if necessary, through deficits of central and state budgets. The panchayats must have the full financial authority to design and implement these projects. Transparency and the right to information at all levels would be the mechanism through which our political democracy is brought closer to our as yet grossly distorted economic democracy.

    --Amit Bhaduri--
    Issue: VOL 40 No. 04 January 22 - January 28, 2005


11. Right to Information in Elections
    

    The Election Commission guidelines for the disclosure of information pertaining to candidates? antecedents will remain toothless unless they are properly complied with and the information is disseminated to voters. A quick assessment of how the guidelines were implemented in two municipal elections in Karnataka.

    --Samuel Paul--
    Issue: VOL 39 No. 02 January 10 - January 16, 2004


12. Maharashtra: Quiet Burial of Right to Information
    

    The right to information has been legitimised in Maharashtra for over three years but suffers from numerous exemptions and exceptions. There appears to be an attempt to privatise the concerned departments to put them out of reach of the information law in order to protect widespread corruption.

    --S S Wagle--
    Issue: VOL 38 No. 21 May 24 - May 30, 2003


13. Maharashtra: Limited Access to Information
    
    Issue: VOL 38 No. 11 March 15 - March 21, 2003


14. Evaluation of Computerisation of Land Records in Karnataka
    

    Computerisation of land records can solve many of the multiple problems that affect the system in rural India. As this case study of computerisation in Gulbarga district of Karnataka shows, farmers benefit in many ways - the record of rights of tenancy and cultivation is immediately accessible, online mutation keeps the records current, there is greater transparency and the system is less prone to manipulation. However, as the case study shows, computerisation is no panacea. There are operational problems arising from power breakdowns that lead to delays and the long distances farmers have to travel to obtain certificates result in very limited net savings to farmers. Besides, computerisation does not seem to aid land reforms. The field survey did not find a single case of tenancy or surplus land that had been unearthed by computerisation.

    --Manoj Ahuja , A P Singh--
    Issue: VOL 41 No. 01 January 07 - January 13, 2006


15. Who Speaks for the Governed ?
    

    Global disparities over access to information and communication technologies formed the basis of the call for a UN-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society that took place in two phases in Geneva (2003) and Tunis (2005). In addition to the private sector and state delegates, accredited civil society organisations were for the first time invited to the table to participate in debates over financing ICT for development, ensuring cultural diversity, the future of intellectual property rights and debating the merits of a new system of internet governance. This article critically examines the role of civil society in proposing a "humanitarian agenda" that contests the dominant neoliberal mode of governance within the WSIS process. Specifically, the article considers why narrow claims for recognition - expressed in the right to freedom of information - eclipsed more expansive claims for both recognition and redistribution in terms of access to ICT infrastructure and content. It draws from feminist insights into the normative dimensions of global social justice after more than two decades of theory and praxis around transnational activism and the challenges of deliberation through difference.

    --Paula Chakravarty--
    Issue: VOL 41 No. 03 January 21 - January 27, 2006


16. Broadcast Regulation and Public Right to Know
    

    The question of how satellite television is to be regulated has been differently interpreted in India. The orthodox viewpoint of airwaves ?belonging? to the public is one that is difficult to enunciate especially with regard to the principles of instrumentality and agency. While constitutional provisions ensuring ?freedom of expression? remain open-ended on the matter of regulation, the debate itself has juxtaposed the interests of the television networks vis-à-vis the ministry of information and broadcasting, while the public, in whose ostensible interests the debate is being waged, remains entirely in the dark.

    --Sukumar Muralidharan--
    Issue: VOL 42 No. 09 March 03 - March 09, 2007