BackRTI: A thrilling but sobering experience
The real power of RTI lies in the fact that it has enabled citizens to understand how government functions
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The Congress party is working hard this election season to remind voters of its historic contribution to governance and anti-corruption by enacting the right to information (RTI) law. Indeed, RTI was among the first pieces of legislation brought in by the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance in 2005 and Congress president Sonia Gandhi was at the forefront ensuring its safe passage in Parliament. So, has nine years of RTI lived up to this promise?
India’s experience with RTI is both thrilling and sobering. Thrilling because of the enthusiasm with which citizens used RTI—the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative’s (CHRI) estimation of RTI applications filed across the country in 2011-12 is 4 million.
While the Congress has focused on its role in exposing corruption, the real power of RTI lies in the fact that it has enabled citizens to understand how government functions. This can have far-reaching consequ
Researchers from JPAL-MIT (Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology) studied the effects of this information campaign on voter behaviour in 10 electoral constituencies. The findings were significant. The information campaign improved voter turnout by 3.5% and high-performing lawmakers saw an increase in their vote share; attending ration and police committee meetings increased incumbent vote share by over seven percentage points.
The government on its part has been a reluctant participant. This may come as a surprise, but the rate of rejection of RTI applications is relatively low. Data from RTI Assessment and Analysis Group (RAAG), a national study on the implementation of RTI in 2009, show that RTI applications had a 50-60% chance of receiving a response from the government. The more recent CHRI study estimated rejection rates at 10%. But this may soon change, as early findings from a new study by RAAG suggest that rejection rates are rising rapidly.
Here is the bigger surprise—RTI applications matter. The genius of RTI is that it is designed to engage directly with the key instrument of the Indian bureaucracy—paperwork and files. RTI applications are submitted on paper, acknowledgment slips are mandatory and responses are time-bound and have to be given on paper. In essence, every RTI application requires the system to open a file. And once a file has been opened, the system simply has to respond, thus triggering a virtuous cycle of action.
That RTI applications lead to action is best evidenced in an experimental study by economists Leonid Peisakhin and Paul Pintowho examined different ways of accessing ration cards in Delhi, to find that filing an RTI application is almost as effective as paying a bribe. Applicants who paid a bribe received their cards within two-and-a-half months of submitting their applications. Those who filed an RTI received their cards within four months. Applicants who simply filed applications and resorted to neither the bribe nor the RTI route were still waiting to receive their cards one year later.
This is not to suggest that governments have embraced RTI. Although RTI applications are difficult to ignore, substantive reforms—reviewing internal rules and procedures, updating record management and filing systems—which are necessary for transparent governance, have been firmly resisted. Moreover, crucial provisions, like section 4 of RTI that mandates departments to proactively disclose information, have been all but ignored.
And rather than use RTI as an opportunity to identify information constraints faced by citizens and improve business processes, bureaucrats have busied themselves complaining about the vexatious, frivolous and voluminous nature of applications. In fact RTI’s singular impact on our governance systems has been the introduction of these words in to our governance vocabulary. So, in practice, RTI is a reactive law that responds to citizens’ requests for information rather than a law that proactively builds the foundations of transparent government.
Bureaucrats are not alone. Every arm of government has repeatedly sought to resist RTI and calls to amend the law are now a regular occurrence. This is hardly surprising. RTI exposes government decision-making to the possibility of scrutiny, thus challenging traditional modes of getting things done. And this generates a new set of pressures that need to be negotiated.
Responding to the pressures of RTI requires striking a delicate balance between the need for discretion in decision-making and the imperatives of transparency—how to ensure that transparency in appointments doesn’t curb the discretion to hire the right people? How to ensure that transparency in political parties doesn’t encroach on the internal workings of parties? Crucially, it requires tackling head-on the causes of administrative failure and the breakdown of rule-based decision-making, including the vexed questions of bureaucratic incentives, political influence on career paths, staff capacity and so on.
Negotiating this complex world of transparent governance requires imaginative political leadership. On this, the Congress, for all its support to the idea of RTI, has quite simply failed. Rather than actively engage with the challenges posed by RTI, it has been at the forefront of efforts to amend the law. And this has also emboldened efforts to resist RTI. It is now commonplace for bureaucrats and politicians to argue that RTI has made decision-making impossible. This failure to provide the leadership needed and build the foundations of a transparent government is sobering, for in the long run it may mean that a significant opportunity has been lost.
Yamini Aiyar is a senior research fellow and director of the Accountability Initiative of the Centre for Policy Research.
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