A new brief

Good things should not be curbed. Certainly not a legislation to which so much is owed by so many. The Right to Information Act is a fundamental democratic achievement for India, one that took a long time in coming for a proclaimed democratic state. And when it did, the system became more transparent, if not cleaner. Ordinary citizens, urban and rural, with little or no ability to negotiate their way through bureaucratic information labyrinths — whether something that affects them personally or some policy matter or law — could make use of the RTI Act, to either put relevant information in the public domain or act on it or both. A brief recollection brings to mind illegal mining in Karnataka, allegations of corruption in the Commonwealth Games, or even something as recent as the Adarsh Society scam. The power and necessity of the RTI Act was common knowledge, akin to the UK’s Freedom of Information Act 2000.

Certainly, the RTI can do with streamlining to enable the law to serve citizens better. Any empowerment of citizens to exercise vigilance and demand systemic accountability has to be balanced against unnecessary or frivolous citizen activism, as taxpayers’ money and the state’s time are taxed in the process. However, can the department of personnel and training’s proposal to introduce radical restrictions on RTI applications be welcomed with enthusiasm? Unfortunately not. Limiting a single RTI application to a single subject may be open to debate. But the 250-word cap that the DoPT proposes for a single query sounds like a gag order that could compromise the efficacy and hitherto success of the landmark legislation.

This ridiculous appeal to, or constraint of, brevity is too arbitrary. Where RTI applications are filed by citizens of vastly differing degrees of literacy and financial solvency across the expanse of this vast country, the 250-word cap and the limitation to a single topic can all add up to derailing a still new and immensely empowering law that’s been operating more or less without a hitch. The government needs to reconsider not the need to smoothen the RTI Act but the particulars of this proposal.