Historical Background Of Rti Act, 2005 6d2e1e

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The aim of this project is to acquaint the reader with the Historical Background of RTI Act, 2005. I would like to extend my gratitude and sincere thanks towards the cooperating faculty of Law in Army Institute of Law without whom this project would be of much difficulty. Our Professor, Mrs. Amrita Rathi has pushed us towards achieving newer levels of understanding and grasping all that we can in the Laws of Information Technology. I would also like to thank the ing piers and not forgetting to mention, my parents who have ed me throughout my life and without whom understanding the ways of making a good, no, a better project, a thought that might seem very obscure to few individuals.

INTRODUCTION In the life of Indian Republic, the first political commitment to the citizen's right to information came up on the eve of the Lok Sabha Elections in 1977 as a corollary to public resentment against suppression of information, press censorship and abuse of authority during the Internal Emergency of 1975-77. In its election manifesto of the 1977, the Janata Party promised "an open government," and declared that it would not 'misuse the intelligence services and governmental authority for personal and partisan ends." Pursuant to this commitment, the Janata government headed by Morarji Desai constituted in 1977 a working group to ascertain if the Official Secrets Act, 1923, could be modified so as to facilitate if the Official Secrets Act, 1923 could be modified so as to facilitate greater flow of information to the public. The working group comprising officials from the cabinet Secretariat and the Ministries of Home Affairs, Finance and Defence laboured for months to recommend that the Act of 1923 should be retained without change. This 'no change' recommendation was far from popular expectations. The very composition of the group, however, was indicative to the kind of recommendations made by it Bureaucracy by its nature reveals in secrecy, and hence, any other kind of recommendation

would

have

been

an

contented

to

regulate

its

communication system with "We, the People of India" along the network of the colonial Official Secrets Act (Maheswari 1980). INDIA: The events which helped create political commitment to the right to information for the second time had resemblance with the historical context out of which the principle of public access to information evolved in Sweden. In 1986, the Supreme Court in the famous case of Mr. Kulwal vs Jaipur Municipal Corporation gave a clear cut directive that Freedom of Speech and Expression provided under Article 19 of the Constitution clearly implies Right

to Information as without information the freedom of speech and expression cannot be fully used by the citizens. The National Front Government's renewed commitment to this right was the outcome of the people's frustration over the earlier government's reluctance to part with the information relating to Bofors and other deals (Guha Roy 1990). In its 1989 Lok Sabha Election Manifesto, the National Front Committed itself to "open government", and declared unequivocally that "people's right to information shall be guaranteed through Constitutional provisions". Reintegrating this commitment, the them Prime Minister V.P. Singh, in his first broadcast to the nation in December 1989 said, "We will have to increase access to information. If the government functions in full public view, wrong doings will be minimised. To this end, Official Secrets Act will be amended and we will make the functioning more transparent. Right to information will be enshrined in our Constitution." Sadly, despite such strong commitment, there was actually no headway towards transparency and openness in our governmental functioning due to the early fall of the National Front Government. Subsequently, the National Agenda for Governance of the present multi-party coalition called National Democratic Alliance (NDA) declared: "Our first commitment to the people is to give a stable, honest, transparent, and efficient government capable of accomplishing all-round development. For this the government shall introduce time-bound programme of needed istrative reforms…." In pursuance with this commitment, the NDA Government introduced the Freedom of Information Bill, 2000 in the Parliament. After having been pending for about two years the Bill was finally ed by the parliament on 4th December, 2002 and it received the assent of the President of India on 6th January, 2003. Meanwhile, instead of waiting for a central legislation, half a dozen states have enacted their own laws on right to information (RTI). These

include Goa (1997), Tamil Nadu (1997), Rajasthan (2000), Maharashtra (2000), Karnataka (2000) and Delhi (2001). Besides, Madhya Pradesh has issued wideranging istrative directives on dissemination of information upto the level of Gram Panchayats. Interestingly, all the states that have their own RTI laws were non-NDA partners ruled states when the Act was ed. In some of these states, the law is too weak. The Tamil Nadu Act, for instance, has imposed more than twenty restrictions on the application of the right. The Goa and Karnataka Acts, on the other hand, have several good features. However, in all these states, the concerned citizens and civil society organizations still complain about denial of information on important issues relating to public interest. The Freedom of Information Act, 2002 has evoked lot of controversy on various issues. Some of them are notably as follows : (a) The Act exempts from disclosure "information exchanged in confidence between the Central and State governments or any of their authorities or agencies." It is commonly felt that this is too wide a clause to cover a lot of such information which should otherwise be available to the people. (b) A major lacuna of the Act is that it does not specifically provide for penalties against the officials who in violation, of the law, would either refuse to provide information or give false, misleading or incomplete information. (c) In this age of economic liberalization when the governments are keen on outsourcing many of their traditional functions to private agencies and allowing foreign direct investments in telecom, power, banking and other major sector, the Act, however, does not apply to the private sector, in contrast to the South African law enacted in the same year which specifically brought the private sector under its purview so that there could be no disparity

between the public sector and the private sector engaged in similar commercial activity. (d) The most serious shortcoming of the Act lies in that it provides for appeals only within the government bodies. It not only bars jurisdiction of courts but also ensures that no appeal should lie even with an independent body.

It has taken India 77 years for transition from an opaque system of governance, legitimised by the Colonial Official Secrets Act, to one where citizens can demand the right to information. The recent enactment of the Freedom of Information Act, 2002 marks a significant shift for Indian democracy, for the greater the access of citizens to information, the greater the responsiveness of government to community needs. In 1994, Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan an organisation for worker’s rights, started a grassroot campaign for Right to Information, demanding information concerning development works in rural Rajasthan. This movement grew and the campaign resulted in the govt of Rajasthan enacting a law on Right to Information in 2000. In 1996, National Campaign for People’s Right to Information, one among several civil society groups, was founded with the objective of getting legislation on RTI ed. In 1997, Tamil Nadu became the first state in India to have ed a law on Right to Information. In pursuance with the commitment of NDA, the new coalition to implement its National Agenda on Governance, introduced Freedom of Information Bill, 2000 in the Parliament. After having been pending for about two years, the Bill was finally ed by the parliament on 4 th December, 2002 and it received the assent of the President of India on 6th January, 2003.

Meanwhile, instead of waiting for a central legislation, half a dozen states have enacted their own laws on right to information. These include, Goa, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Delhi. In 2004, the UPA govt appointed a national Advisory Council to monitor implementation of govt schemes and advise govt on policy and law NAC recommended changes to the existing Freedom of Information Act. RTI bill 2004 tabled in parliament as applicable only to the Union govt. The civil society protested against the bill as most of the information required by the common man was from state govt. after heavy lobbying by NRI and other organisations the RTI Act, 2005 was ed with 150 amendments.

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA:The Right to Information that the Indians have is formulated as Freedom of Information to the citizens of the US, with the enactment of Freedom of Information Act. The Freedom of Information Act (5 USC § 552) (FOIA) is one of the most important legal tools citizens and reporters have for furthering government transparency in the United States. And yet, history shows that empowering the citizenry as a check on the government has worried many of the executive branch, including presidents of both parties, and reminds us that citizens must be constantly vigilant to protect hard-earned transparency rights. FOIA

was

originally

championed

by

Democratic

Congressman John

Moss from California in 1955 after a series of proposals during the Cold War led to a steep a rise in government secrecy. Moss found from newspaper editors and journalists, but he could not find Republican cosponsors until years later. During the Kennedy and Johnson istrations, he received from a young Representative named Donald Rumsfeld.

Unfortunately, President Lyndon B. Johnson, a fellow Democrat, opposed the bill—in fact, every federal agency and department at the time opposed it. However, when the Senate ed its version of the bill, it became clear that government transparency was going to win out in the end. Moss issued one final report that clarified rules and exemptions for the government agencies, and the House ed the bill soon after (with a vote of 307-0). With the finalized FOIA bill now on his desk, President Johnson still had his own concerns. On the 4th of July, 1966, Johnson decided not to hold a public event for the g—which he did for other major bills. Instead, he issued a g statement when making the bill a law, in which he attempted to undercut the law by focusing on exemptions for national security and FOIA's room for interpretation. Yet the last sentence of his g statement is the one that endures: “I sign this measure with a deep sense of pride that the United States is an open society.” Though the 1966 bill was a huge step towards government transparency, FOIA lacked the teeth necessary to force government agencies to comply. It wasn't until 1974, after the Watergate scandal and the tight-lipped Nixon istration, that Congress amended FOIA to become the bill it is today. The Senate and the House introduced many new requirements, timeframes, sanctions for wrongly withheld information, and necessary language waiving fees for journalists and public interest groups. President Gerald Ford's chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, an early er of the original FOIA, and the head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, Antonin Scalia, pushed the president to veto the FOIA amendments. Ultimately, Ford agreed. In his veto message, Ford called the bill unconstitutional, felt that national secrets were at risk, and thought the tenday deadline was too burdensome.

The House and Senate would have nothing of this, however, and overrode his veto. In 1996, President Clinton signed into law the Electronic Freedom of Information

Act

Amendments.

In

his

g

statement,

Clinton acknowledged how new technologies, including the Internet, would allow for greater transparency: the amendments required agencies to make documents available in electronic formats and digitally distributed. The response timeframe was also extended from ten to twenty days, though in practice this change had little effect. But after September 11, 2001, government transparency saw a number of restrictions. President George W. Bush issued Executive Order 13233, which limited access to former presidential records, drawing ire especially from archivists and librarians. Soon after, FOIA was amended to limit access to governmental records from foreign governments through the Intelligence Authorization Act of 2002. In 2007, President Bush did sign the OPEN Government Act of 2007, laudedthe law, which extended crucial services to alternative journalists and bloggers, defining them as of the news media. (Journalists get cheaper access to records.) It also established the Office of Government Information Services, which oversees government compliance with FOIA. However, the Bush istration’s compliance with FOIA was sharply criticized by open government groups, and was widely regarded as the most secretive istration in history. In 2016, 50 years after FOIA first became law, President Barack Obama signed the FOIA Improvement Act. The law contained modest FOIA reforms, including codifying the Obama istration's "presumption of disclosure," which specifically limits agency discretion to withhold records under FOIA. It's unclear what impact the presumption of disclosure will have on increasing

transparency. Obama had included similar language in a memorandum on FOIA reform he issued on his first day in office in 2009, but the laudatory language did not translate into greater records disclosure. In fact, during the Obama istration, government became more secretive. The FOIA Improvement Act also required federal agencies to create a central online portal that will allow anyone to file a request with any government agency. The law also required agencies to update their FOIA regulations, as many agencies had not done so since age of the OPEN Government Act in 2007. Additionally, the law put a 25-year limit on the ability for any federal agency to withhold documents under the deliberative process privilege, preventing agencies from withholding records that describe historic agency decision-making.