The annual Right to Information (RTI) week 2012 was officially launched on October 5, 2012 by the Chief Minister of Nagaland. “The seven years of RTI in our state has been so far so good”, was the observation of the CM, although it would seem that in reality we still have a long way to go towards having a RTI friendly government. Perhaps we will have to wait for the completion of a decade (three more years left) to actually see how we have performed i.e. ensuring transparency, good governance and thereby as our CM says ‘delivering goods to the people”. Right now it is still early to praise ourselves. The next few years will therefore demand greater collective effort to make the RTI a success story in Nagaland. Obviously there seems to be difference of perception on how to go about implementing the RTI regime. Interestingly the CM has put the onus on citizens to fully implement the RTI Act. “It all depends on the citizens, they have to be responsible…” was what the CM was quoted as saying. While no doubt citizens have to take the initiative to seek information from public authorities i.e. the government, the underlying premise of the RTI Act goes beyond mere disposal of appeals initiated by citizens. The RTI Act under Section 4(2) in fact exhorts that voluntary disclosure of information by public authorities should become so common “that the public have minimum resort to the use of this Act to obtain information”. A former Chief Information Commissioner A.N Tiwari once said that “RTI Act serves best when the citizens feels the least need to use it”. And so in order to implement the RTI Act, doesn’t the onus lie on the public authorities? As head of the government, the CM should in fact direct the officials and government departments to maximize information (disclosure) in the public domain and thereby automatically promote transparency.
In stark contrast to the observation of the CM, the Chief Information Commissioner Nagaland, Lalhuma IAS (Rtd) mentioned that effective implementation of RTI Act 2005 is the “collective responsibility of the political executive, the bureaucracy, the public, NGOs, media and the Nagaland Information Commission”. So it is not just the public or the media as is often assumed to be the case but rather in order to bring systemic change and transform governance, the role of the political executive and the bureaucracy remains fundamental. And he has rightly mentioned that “transparency in the functioning of the government machinery will determine whether or not good governance will be brought about” and not the other way round. As per suggestion available in the public domain, our CIC in Nagaland could perhaps as a first step rank public authorities or government departments on the scale of transparency. In this way the most transparent or RTI friendly department can be identified and awarded during such occasion as the RTI week every year. The CIC on his part should force public functionaries to initiate steps to promote transparency. There is provision in the RTI Act to do this. And for those in authority—political or bureaucracy, rather than depending on the citizens to implement the RTI regime, they should be the ones to actually take a proactive role towards making RTI as an instrument to maximize disclosures and bring to an end the culture of official secrecy and thereby neutralizing one of the root causes of corruption. Obviously this is going to be a tall order for the government establishment but one that is needed to move towards an RTI friendly and a more open government that delivers.
