The Right to Information (RTI) Act, without any doubt, remains a powerful tool for citizen empowerment. There is also no doubt that a lot more is needed to be done to realize its potential in fostering a more informed citizenry and more accountable government.
The government earlier this week rightly underscored that the objective of the RTI Act is to empower citizens by way of promoting transparency and accountability in the working of the administration and eradicating corruption to make democracy work for the people in real sense.
Without any doubt, an informed citizen is well equipped to keep necessary vigil on the instruments of governance and make the government more accountable towards the citizens.
All government agencies come under the purview of the legislation, and it contains mechanisms devised on multiple levels to ensure that the Act is followed in letter and spirit.
However there have been persistent and growing worries and one such remains non adherence by many departments to Section 4 of Act which makes it binding for all the public authorities operating in the Jammu and Kashmir to make the suo-moto and pro-active disclosure of all the permissible information available with them within a period of 120 days from the date of commencement of the legislation.
Under Section 4, the departments need to maintain all records in a manner which facilitates the right to information and can be computerised within a reasonable time; provide information suomotu at regular intervals through various means of communications, including internet; publish particulars of its organisation, functions and duties, the decision making process, a statement on its documents, consultation processes on its policies, details of on subsidy programmes, the budget allocated to each of its agency. One also hopes that the disclosures are not made with outdated information. The officials would be advised to provide greater voluntary information on official websites, which should also ease their load.
Unfortunately also, sometimes there are delays on part of the government functionaries in furnishing the information. At times the information is denied by resorting to jugglery.
While the government underlined that significant strides have been made by the various departments, offices and other agencies of the Government in realizing the vision of the Right to Information Act, 2005, more steps are needed to be taken to usher in accountability in governance and fuse authority with accountability at all levels.
The legislation casts important obligations on public authorities so as to facilitate the citizens of the country to access the information held under their control and same should be ensured without any difficulty, both sought for and suo-moto