The role of AID in the implementation of the Right to Information (RTI) act by the Indian embassy in USA has been prominently featured in the July 2007 edition of the Siliconeer.
After persistent efforts from volunteers of the Association for India's Development (AID), the Embassy of India in Washington DC has implemented the Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005, bringing its operations fully under the Act's purview. The RTI Act is being extensively used in India to obtain information from Government offices, and this recent action extends the implementation of the Act to all Indian citizens living in the US as well.
"Filing an RTI application is easier than the leave of absence applications you wrote in your primary school" says Somu Kumar, a volunteer of the Anti Corruption Team (ACT) of AID, living in Virginia. Somu is one of the first Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) to have filed an RTI application from the U.S. and has requested information that may help hold Dow Chemicals, headquartered in the USA, accountable for Bhopal gas leak of 1984 and to clean up the Bhopal plant that continues be covered with Toxic waste which has steadily seeped into the ground water which the local communities use for drinking.
Any Indian citizen with a valid Indian passport can now file an RTI application to the Mr. Rahul Chhabra, who is the Public Information Officer at the Indian Embassy paying a fee of 24 cents which is the equivalent of INR 10. As specified in the act, the Embassy will automatically transfer the application to the relevant department in India if the information requested does not pertain to the Embassy itself. The applicant should get a response within 35 days or he/she can file an appeal to the Appellate Authority and later to the Chief Information Commissioner. More details pertaining to filing can be found at http://rti.aidindia.org/
This implementation is likely to have wide range of implications. For example it will substantially help all NRIs who invite their parents to the U.S. Previously passport applications took an incredibly long time with several visits to the passport office and some amount of bribe. Now with RTI, passports are being sent on time because the officials cannot answer questions posed through RTI that they HAVE to answer to avoid being penalized. RTI has also come as a boon for expatriate Indians who own some property back home and are worried about land sharks gobbling up their precious landholding. Now those elements can be kept in check.
"Having been complaining all my life about improper roads and street lights malfunctioning and corruption at Government departments, RTI came as a great boon to me. But somehow being here in the U.S., I felt left out of all the action. With RTI being implemented now in the U.S. all of us now have the opportunity to do something more than just complaining about things back home" says an elated Arun Gopalan, a Maryland Resident, who went on to file an application about the malfunctioning of streetlights on his street back homeDr. Supriya Kumar, Biology Researcher in University of Chicago, filed an application to find out how many farmers and artisans have committed suicide between 2004-2006 in Vidharbha, Maharashtra, how many of them owned land, what was the procedure to transfer this land to the spouse, and in how many cases did they transfer the land titles? She hopes that this information will help in petitioning thegovernment of India to reduce/remove costs of land title transfer for widows / widowers of farmers who committed suicide.
However the path of getting RTI to the U.S was not all that rosy. Volunteers of AID have been campaigning since November of 2006 to get the Indian Embassy officials in Washington to implement the RTI act. A number of emails and phone calls were made. Later realizing that the communication with the Embassy officials was proving to be futile, a few volunteers started communicating directly with the Chief Information Commissioner in India, Mr Wajahat Habibullah seeking his intervention. The Central Information Commission issued an order around April 2007 bringing all the missions abroad under the purview of the RTI act. It took one and a half more months of campaigning by AID volunteers to get Indian Embassy in Washington D.C. to accept its first RTI petition. AID's Anti-Corruption Team focuses on spreading awareness about the RTI Act in the USA, and supports non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in India to fight corruption. AID volunteers started getting involved in RTI when they participated in a world-wide campaign against a proposed amendment to remove file notings from the RTI act by the Indian Government in August 2006. File notings are a part of the Government documentation which specify the reasoning process, factors and people responsible in any decision taken by the Government and thus help to bring accountability to all Governmental undertakings. The amendments were then withdrawn immediately. Since then AID has set up an Anti-Corruption Fund (ACF) and hopes to raise at least $50,000 to help with implementation of RTI and National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), another progressive Indian act that is not achieving its potential due to rampant corruption. With an annual budget of 3 billion dollars, NREGA guarantees 100 days of daily-wage employment to all rural Indian families. This is vital income that relieves these families of the need to migrate in search of employment - strengthening both their food security as well as their social stability and civil rights. The most marginalized communities fight the hardest against corruption and for food security, as these are at the heart of their struggle to live a life of dignity. AID is committed to making that these landmark pieces of legislation, namely Right to Information Act and National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, addressing the interlinked issues of corruption and food security are implemented properly in their right forms and spirit. NREGA together with the RTI act can help achieve this for such marginalized communities.
Several AID full-timers in India have committed their time to anti-corruption efforts. In the past year, since that the Indian government has begun to implement the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), audits done by AID volunteers and partners in Orissa and U.P. has exposed wide-spread corruption. For instance during AID-Orissa's audit in works such as road construction and soil conservation in Gajapati district, several villagers voiced concerns that while they did not work, and were paid no money, their names appeared in muster rolls (documentation the Government keeps for NREGA) and job cards as having received payments. Lakhs of rupees were thus pocketed in each panchayat.
Based on AID-Orissa's report, the district collector ordered an enquiry. People of Uppalada village fearlessly spoke of rampant corruption at the block level, by engineers and panchayat members. In the panchayat elections of February 2007, corruption became a hot issue. Uppalada elected a new sarpanch, who promised to implement NREGA works in a more transparent way. From March, AID-Orissa began street plays in Gandahati, Bagusala, Agarakhandi, Karandi and Upalada panchayats raising awareness of people's right to work and to access unemployment benefits, if no work was made available. Nation-wide, nearly 50% of money available for NREGA was not spent in 2006-07 as the government hasn't made NREGA work application forms widely available in villages. Unspent money invites corruption. After a campaign of theeducational street plays, AID-India village volunteers distributed NREGA work applications and hundreds of people submitted them and got dated receipts.
The full-timers also plan to keep the State Information Commissions in check in various states by reviewing their decisions periodically and making sure that the RTI act is being implemented properly and the erring officials are allowed to gonot let go scot-free. ACT volunteers have been involved in such activities in the past. In October 2006 unhappy with the leniency of the functioning of the Chief Information Commissioner in dealing with such erring offcers, volunteers of ACT, carried out extensive research and analysis of the decisions given by the CIC and after finding substantial data to support their claim of leniency, petitioned the President of India to question the CIC about the implementation of the Act. Thereafter, the President met with a delegation of some partners of AID like Parivartan and listened to all their concerns. Since then, there has been a visible change in the functioning of the CIC, who for the first time started imposed penalties on faulting officers. Currently AID also supports anti-corruption work by various partners in New Delhi, Gujarat, UP, AP, Orissa, Jharkhand and Rajasthan. Back in the U.S., close to 10 applications have been filed so far in what has been an encouraging start to the RTI awareness campaign. Some NRIs have even used RTI to get their tax returns from India that had been pending for more than 5 years. ACT will continue its efforts to spread awareness about Right to Information and urges all citizens to participate actively. India's RTI is similar to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in the U.S. that is so extensively used by the American public that 3-5 million FOIA applications are filed every year.
"The volunteers of the anti-corruption team are committed to helping out the NRIs with applications. We really hope all the NRIs help us in weeding out corruption entirely from the system by using RTI extensively and supporting AID's Anti-corruption efforts" says Vinodth Mohanam, a Portland resident and a member of AID-ACT.
The AID Chapter at Bay Area is hosting a fundraising concert by the Indian rock band Indian Ocean on July 14, 2007 at Chabot College Theater, Hayward, CA . The proceeds of the event will support initiatives that will spread awareness about the Right to Information act and hence would weed out corruption and demand greater accountability from the Government. For more information, please visit concerts.aidindia.org/indianocean
The RTI Act 2005 is widely considered as one of the most progressive laws ever passed in independent India. It empowers Indian citizens to question government decisions, and makes it mandatory for the government to disclose all information pertaining to those decisions. RTI when implemented properly is strongly believed to be an effective tool for controlling rampant corruption in government departments and is already proving to be a potent weapon against corruption. A number of these success stories have been documented in the "Success Stories" section of AID's RTI website http://rti.aidindia.org Association for India's Development (AID) is a US-based non-profit organization, which supports grassroots groups working towards sustainable, just, equitable and holistic development in India. It was formed in 1991 and has about 1000 volunteers across US. It raises about 1 million dollars/year and supports NGOs working on Education, Health, Rural development, Social justice, Women's empowerment and Human rights. More information can be found at www.aidindia.org |
