The Hindu Business Line : Right to information

EVEN WITHOUT the new right to information law, the average citizen of India has been having much greater access to information following the digital revolution. Take, for example, the research that went into the writing of this piece. Tracing the progress of the Bill, passed by the Rajya Sabha a couple of days ago, one came to know, from the Net, that the Bill was introduced in Parliament on December 23, 2004, and that the report of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Personnel, Public Grievances, Law and Justice was laid on the table of the Lok Sabha on March 21. Its earlier avatar, the Freedom of Information Bill, 2000, was introduced in the Lok Sabha on July 25, 2000 and passed on December 3, 2002. This Bill was never enacted into law.

As for the 2000 exercise, one learnt that the core of the Bill lay in Clause 3 which said that every citizen had the right to information from a public body; that it was the duty of the public body to maintain all records duly catalogued and indexed; that it was the duty of the public body to make available to the person requesting information "as it is under an obligation to obtain and furnish and shall not withhold any information or limit its availability to the public except the information specified in Clause 4"; and that all individuals, whether citizens or not, had the right to such information which affected their life and liberty.

The two texts also revealed an important difference — that while the 2000 Bill named a vague appellate authority in case of a complaint lodged by a citizen seeking a piece of information and failing to get it, the 2004 document is more specific in that it has in place a structured central information commission, which has to look into any reasonable complaint made by a citizen. An interesting difference between what the 2004 document stated, in its pristine form, on the appointment of the Central Information Commissioner (CIC) and what was passed by Parliament after the debates and the amendments is that, in the version passed by Parliament — and so stands to become a part of the law of the land — the Chief Justice of India has been dropped from the committee that would choose the CIC leaving the two other personages — the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha — untouched.

The Net also tells us that in 1996 the Press Council of India had prepared a draft Bill to secure the citizen's right to information, called the Right to Information Bill, 1996. Next year, the Institute of Rural Development in Hyderabad also drew up a draft Bill. These exercises resulted in a national debate which led New Delhi to set up a working group to study the subject and see if there was need to have full-fledged right to information legislation. This group saw the need for such a law but that it would have to be called the `Freedom of Information Bill' as the "right to information" had been "judicially recognised as part of the fundamental right to free speech and expression". (The 2000 exercise was called the Freedom of Information Bill while in 2004 it was termed the Right to Information Bill.) As the Prime Minister said, the new law heralds the "dawn of a new era" and will strengthen the foundations of democracy. But the law must be implemented in the right spirit and with dedication if what is on paper is to be translated into practice, leading to India becoming a truer democracy in every sense of the word.

Ranabir Ray Choudhury

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