Guest Post: Bringing transparency and efficiency in Government functioning

The following is a guest post from Sushant Sinha, the person behind Indian Kanoon.

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While the Right to Information (RTI) Act empowers Indians to obtain any
information about government functioning, it is still mostly reactive in
nature. People have to ask for specific information which will be furnished
only with in a specific time frame. In the age of information technology such
delays are of astronomical order. Making information proactively
available to people can significantly improve government delivery of services
by providing transparency in government functioning. Imagine an ordinary Indian
citizen that can browse, search, plot and compare all government contracts with
a few clicks. How fantastic would that be?

Some government departments and agencies have starting providing information
proactively about their activity. However, it is not quite clear as to why many
departments are still trailing in providing the information. The potential is
widely subdued. One important problem is that the software used by government
departments is mostly in house developed and in a very bureaucratic fashion.
They are not usually not answerable to any citizen about how fresh and complete
the data is. Unfortunately, the software developers can control all these
decisions without being answerable. And many times it is not clear whether
government department is not providing the data or the software is hiding the
information.

What is needed is to open up the software that government is going to use. Some
citizens can easily look into why certain things are behaving the way they are
and educate others. Other citizens can contribute the features that they think
are important. Hence, the software that controls the government information
would be accessible to everyone for criticism and contribution.

Beside transparency issue, Government will also benefit by leveraging community
support for its software development projects. This will also speed up
development and bring e-services much quickly to the people.

Finally the question is how we can accomplish this idea. If government is ready
to open up its software development agencies, well and good. Otherwise we
should start CodeForIndia (very similar to the organization
http://codeforamerica.org/). This can operate independent of government and be
supported by other organizations interested in government transparency and
efficient delivery of services. The organization should compete then with
existing government agencies for software development for India.

Anonymous question (edited):

Is the idea to open up even more information on government functioning,
possibly all? Is that even practically or legally possible? How could
government function by opening up everything?

My Reply:

Of course there is some level of confidentiality required in government
functioning. I think it is legislature's job to clearly demarcate what is not
public information. Currently, RTI draws that line. I am only arguing that the
information that can be obtained by public using a petition should be
"proactively" available. And the objective of this effort should be to enable
government agencies/departments to proactively share it by providing
technological help. A lot of that is missing which limits government agencies
in sharing the data. And government benefits by zero cost in implementation.

Lacuna in the Right to Information Act

Since its enactment in 2005, the Right to Information Act has been lauded as a significant measure for the achievement of a more accountable and transparent government and bureaucracy. In a guest post on this blog recently, Yamini Aiyar has discussed the infrastructural weaknesses and the mindset problems which threaten the future of the RTI.

My own experience with using the RTI Act for obtaining information has revealed a curious lacuna in the law that to my knowledge has not been the subject of discussion in the news media before. Section 6(1) of the Act provides that any person who desires certain information may make a request in writing to the Central Public Information Officer (CPIO) or the State Public Information Officer (SPIO) of the concerned public authority. If the public information officer (PIO) fails to provide the information within a period of thirty days, then he is deemed to have refused to provide the information. According to section 19(1) of the Act, if the person requesting the information either does not receive the PIO’s decision within the stipulated time period of 30 days or is aggrieved by the PIO’s decision, he can prefer an appeal (first appeal) to an officer who is senior in rank to the PIO in the concerned public authority. Section 19(6) stipulates that such a first appeal must be disposed off within a period of thirty (30) days of receipt of the appeal or within an extended period not greater than forty five (45) days of filing of the appeal. Section 19(3) provides that a second appeal may be preferred against the decision rendered under section 19(6) before the Central Information Commission (CIC) or the State Information Commission. However, unlike the first appeal, there is no stipulated time frame for decision by the CIC or the SIC of a second appeal under section 19(3) of the Act. Consequently, people have no option but to wait patiently for the decision of the CIC or the SIC before they can take judicial action in the matter.

I am informed by frequent users of the RTI Act that the only recourse in such a situation is to send reminders to the CIC and the SIC and hope for an early resolution of the appeal. Apparently, this approach has worked in the past but is clearly inadequate and the RTI Act needs to be amended to address this lacuna in the law.

For whatever its worth as anecdotal evidence of the functioning of the RTI Act, in my experience, an RTI request is much more likely to obtain the required information if it is of a general nature, for instance certain committee reports or information about government policies and programs. However, requests for information about specific governmental action, e.g. grant of an environmental clearance to a particular project are more often than not wholly or partially unsuccessful. In other words, requests for information are more successful when the government department has not so much at stake (e.g. the threat of future litigation) in giving the information. It would be interesting to test the veracity of this hypothesis by conducting a qualitative examination of the cases in which information was successfully obtained to determine how many involved requests for information of the latter kind.