The department of personnel and training (DOPT) under the Union Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions has commissioned international accounting firm PriceWaterhouse Coopers the responsibility to review the RTI Act 2005. Activists say the study may end up protecting government officials. They are conducting a parallel study on how far the RTI has been able to keep up its mandate of providing timely response to “citizens requests for government information’.

Review studies
The accounting firm will review RTI implementation in Assam, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Orissa.

“It will study whether the act has reached the grassroots or is just being used in urban areas. It will look into problems that information officers and seekers face and how the act can be streamlined better,’

said K G Verma, director RTI, DOPT.

Among the criteria for selection of the consultant was that the agency should have carried out such studies elsewhere. Although the firm has no such record, it qualified the financial and technical bids, indicating it has the means to conduct such a study. NGOs had also competed for the tender, says a dopt official. “But their concept paper was very weak and they did not seem to have enough manpower to conduct the study,’ said another dopt official.

NGOs are conducting their independent study under the banner RTI Accountability and Assessment Group, which comprises organizations such as the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (mkss), ncpri, Devdungri, Rajasthan, National Campaign for People’s Right to Information, Delhi, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Delhi, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai and Centre for Studies of Developing Societies, Delhi. mkss was among the organizations that spearheaded the RTI movement in the mid 1990s.

“Our study is not in response to the government’s study but it just happened to have the same timing. The objectives of both studies are similar but methodologies are different. Given the government’s track record, our suspicion is they will subtly try to weaken the act. Besides, the agency involved is an accounting firm, so we can’t be sure of how much they will be able to find out at the village level,’

Singh told Down To Earth.

Their study will cover 10 states and finish by October. A national survey of 20,000 people will be conducted where villagers will be asked to frame RTI applications on a subject and responses of public authorities concerned will be noted. Similar methodology will be followed in urban areas as well. Specific sectors such as media and institutions including high courts and the supreme court will be studied on how they have internalized RTI. Public Information officers (pios) and chief information commissioners of states will also be interviewed.

“Systemic changes in governance are happening gradually. For instance, officials are scared if they do something under political pressure, they know they are answerable to the public. The enthusiasm for the act is there and it will go up. But there are certain issues of implementation that need to be addressed,’ said Singh. Appeals top the list and are among the major deterrents for people to use RTI Act. Besides, these take time.

Only one case (of appeal) is cleared in a day in Andhra Pradesh and in Kerala, just 50 cases were disposed of in 2007, says Arvind Kejriwal of Parivartan, the ngo that used RTI to expose public distribution system scam in Delhi. “Waiting time for appeals in Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh is more than three years and in Delhi, it is up to a year. Information commissioners are killing the act.

They refuse to impose penalty on pios for delaying or giving out incomplete information,’ Kejriwal said. Information officers justify the backlog saying they don’t have enough manpower or cite plain lack of incentive as one of the reasons (see box: Our complaints).

Proactive disclosure
Harinesh Pandya, who runs Janpath, an ngo in Ahmedabad that spreads awareness on RTI, says there is a fundamental problem. “Half the load of RTI   applications will go down if proactive disclosure is made properly,’ he says. Proactive disclosure under section 4 of the act lays down that public authorities have to suo motu declare information pertaining to their functioning under various factors, which include budget allocations, welfare and subsidy schemes, inter-departmental transfers, details of committees, grants, permits and concessions.

Ideally, a person need not file an RTI application for such information.

“While announcing the act in the Lok Sabha, the prime minister had said that proactive information should be provided readily so that a person needs to use RTI as less as possible. But this has not been taken in spirit by pios and hence offices are flooded with applications and appeals,’

says Pandya.

The following example is a case in point. In Jamnagar district in Gujarat, a person filed an RTI application with the labour department in 2007 asking how many inspections on local manual labour employed by Reliance Petroleum factory was carried out in the past five years. The company is supposed to employ 80 per cent local manual labour as a part of conditions for getting tax benefits. But information was denied under section 8 of the act, which says it is not mandatory to provide information relating to commercial confidence or trade secrets, the disclosure of which would harm the competitive position of a third party, unless larger public interest is involved. The seeker, Rafeek Lal Maradia, received information after he filed the second appeal. When the information was granted, the company filed a case in the Gujarat High Court saying it was third party information and that the labour commissioner had given it without the company’s permission. The court put a stay on providing third party information and told the seeker not to use the information provided. The case is pending still.

“This was proactive information which the labour department should have given even without an RTI application but now every department is using this instance for not revealing details,’ says Pandya.

Surendra Srivastava of Lok Satta, an ngo in Mumbai, agrees: “Any information that does not impact the legal personal interest of someone should not be denied to public. Disclosures on who was awarded the tender for road laying etc are denied often. It depends on the pio who feels that by the time the appeal is heard, he will either retire or get transferred,’ he said.

Proactive disclosure becomes all the more necessary because most citizens are still wary of government officers. They do not perceive getting information as their fundamental right. Janpath, along with state information commission and the Gujarat government, is doing a proactive disclosure audit of four public departments in each district of the state to find out what is lacking in their system and suggest additions in them.

Grievance redressal tool
Though there are problems, activists agree RTI is a powerful regulation and has brought in significant changes in governance. Singh says government officers are careful because they know they can be booked under the RTI act if they indulge in corrupt practices. He cites an instance where an officer refused to do the bidding of a retired secretary of his department. The secretary wanted him to allot a servant quarter but the officer did not oblige.

Ministers may have become careful about their travel bills after Maharashtra governor S M Krishna’s travel details got exposed through an RTI application. The disclosure revealed that the governor and his wife spent Rs 35 lakh on 31 trips between Mumbai and Bangalore from December 2004 to November 2006. All the trips were paid from the government exchequer. Visits included those undertaken for weddings, funerals, dance performances, a tennis association meeting and a volleyball championship. In an effort to give the regulation a boost, the Bihar government has introduced RTI applications over phone for those who cannot write. “But,’ says Singh, “the RTI Act has not been used to its potential and there is still a long way to go.’ For now, he hopes the country can wish the regulation a happy third birthday in October this year.

“Our city development plan had many road projects because the public expressed the need for them. We haven’t received the second instalment for a lot of projects and Rs 105 crore for developing 170 km of arterial and sub-arterial roads have still not been released. We haven’t even got an official response,’

says J Manjunath of the Bruhat Bangalore Mahanagar Palike.

Officials in the Union Ministry of Urban Development say the ministry has decided not to clear any more road and transport projects under jnnurm unless cities submitted a comprehensive mobility plan.

“There is no blanket ban but we have asked cities to submit a mobility plan. We did return some projects because cities did not have it,’

says S K Lohia, director in the ministry. The centre formulated a National Urban Transport Policy in April 2006, which stressed that projects should be designed keeping in mind

“The mobility of people rather than vehicles and should accordingly give priority to pedestrians, public transport and integrate land use and transport planning’.

O P Mathur of the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, New Delhi, says the government was focusing more on transport than roads.

“Initially, they cleared a lot of projects but suddenly realized that a lot of money is going into flyovers. But this was not abrupt. They have given money for improving roads where cities have given convincing data for the need,’

he said. “We need to remember that the focus of jnnurm is reforms and not just infrastructure. If Bangalore corporation has not been issued finds, it may be because they have not been able to carry out certain reforms,’ he added.

The move has been criticized because of the centre’s delayed response.

“The government should have made it clear that no flyovers and road projects will be sanctioned unless cities kept in mind decongestion, peddlers and bullock carts. They cleared projects because they were in a hurry to allot funds,’

says Vinay Baindur of Collaborative for Advancement of Studies in Urbanism through Mix-Media.

“The rather unusual use of two similar meaning yet different terms—waste and material—is bound to lead to enormous confusion,’ note D B Boralkar and Claude Alvares, members of the Supreme Court Monitoring Committee on Hazardous Wastes and say that the state pollution control boards won’t be able to deal with the confusion.

The draft rules have been criticized on other fronts as well. The rules exclude biomedical waste, solid waste, waste water and exhaust gases from the category of hazardous waste.

The focus of the rules, experts say, is on recycling. “The proposal states that if a material contains less than 60 per cent contamination by a hazardous constituent, it is eco-friendly,’ says Gopal Krishna, of the Ban Asbestos Network of India.

The rules make the ministry the nodal agency on import and export of waste, sidelining state pollution control boards.

“What is the institutional monitoring/regulatory set-up available with moef for this, especially when field organizations are left out? Will moef now grant permission to transport hazardous materials from Kerala to Noida and issue copies of permissions to state pollution control boards?’ ask Boralkar and Alvares.

Even the new definition of “disposal’ is limited. It is defined as treatment and deposition of any hazardous wastes on land but does not talk about disposal in water bodies and oceans, besides incineration and indefinite storage. Ravi Agrawal of Toxicslink, a Delhi-based ngo, says instead of new rules, better implementation of the existing rules through regular evaluation and monitoring is required.

“The draft rules also violate the Environment Protection Act, 1986, and flout supreme court judgements on hazardous waste cases. In a May 1997 judgement, the apex court had ordered that no authorization/permission would be given by any authority for the import of hazardous waste items which have already been banned under the Basel Convention or to be banned hereafter with effect from the dates specified therein,’ he says.

The draft Hazardous Materials (Management, Handling and Trans boundary Movement) Rule, 2007, have been put up on the ministry’s website and will replace the existing Hazardous Wastes (Management and Handling) Rules 1989, if given the go-ahead.

Mili Majumdar, area convenor, GRIHA, says the rating system has been designed to suit Indian conditions and in particular for non air-conditioned buildings, unlike international rating systems like US-based Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (leed), which is designed for energy efficiency measures in air-conditioned buildings only.But V Raghuraman, principal adviser and chief co-ordinator, energy environment and natural resources, Confederation of Indian Industry, says,

“Leed is far ahead of GRIHA. A rating system is not just about energy consumption of a building but many other things like recycling and natural habitat. There are 30 buildings certified with LEED under India.’

GRIHA has 32 criterias for rating buildings, with a total of 100 points. A building needs to score at least 50 to apply for certification. Preserving landscape during construction; soil conservation after construction; reducing air pollution are some of the qualifying criteria. Buildings will also need to quantify energy consumption in absolute terms and not percentages alone.

But a leed-accredited professional from Delhi says the “social’ aspect, which is “most important’, is missing in GRIHA— and leed as well.

“The basic issues are same in most rating systems. The Japanese system takes into account rehabilitation of displaced people; accessibility for the old or people with special needs. Rating should look at the reuse of old buildings by developing them rather than making new ones, especially for rehabilitation,’

he said. Arvind Krishnan, Department of Architecture, School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi, agrees,

“The challenge is to generate typology of buildings and urban form in its three dimensional configuration—environmentally, socially and economically sustainable. But none of the rating systems can help generate such typologies.’

GRIHA does list minimum disruption of natural ecosystem as a rating criterion. But then the system has agreed to rate the Commonwealth Games Village coming up on the bed of the Yamuna river in Delhi. Experts at TERI pass the buck. “Selection of the site is under the control of the urban planning department. Our job is to minimize losses on the site,’ Majumdar says.