'India's history is in two phases, before and after RTI'

Dec 29, 2010, 12.00am IST

A leading RTI campaigner, Subhash Chandra Agrawal is focussed firmly on ground realities. With a distinguished pedigree of engaging the state and media to bring about improvements to the everyday lives of ordinary people, he speaks to Deep K Datta-Ray about his campaigning work and the RTI Act.

How did you begin campaigning, does it support you financially?

The work supports me emotionally and intellectually! My trade is textiles. All my RTI Act work is done in the mornings and late evenings. I only attend Central Information Commission (CIC) meetings during the day. This is a hobby, but not a self-indulgent hobby because it helps other people by opening avenues for investigation.

All this began 43 years ago with my writing a letter. At university, i saw there was collusion between the bus conductor and the students and so i sent a letter to a newspaper. The next day the bus company came to my campus, and i was so frightened that they were going to do something to me that i ran away. Actually, they had brought the conductor to apologise. It was a potent lesson, that a small individual could be the harbinger of change. From these humble beginnings, i graduated to filing RTI petitions.

What do think of the RTI Act?

Quite simply historians who speak of 'India after Gandhi' are wrong. If we are to compartmentalise, then India's history is in two phases, before and after RTI. The watershed is the Act which current popular historians miss. The Act is the most significant post-independence legislation. RTI's significance lies in that it bestows the common citizen with the powers of the legislator to question.

There is more. A parliamentarian has only one chance to get a written reply to a starred question. We have two more bodies, first the Central Public Information Officer (CPIO), then the CPIO department head and finally the CIC. The Act is good and though it functions well because most CPIOs are user-friendly, there is always room to improve the procedural side of things.

What improvements can be made?

I'll limit myself to a few suggestions! Sections 27 and 28 of the Act give powers to public authorities and the state governments to draft their own rules. On occasion they contradict the Act. For instance, the Delhi high court imposed fees of Rs 500 for a request, whereas the normal fee is Rs 10. The fee is still five times more than the norm and this is a financial bar. Interlinked is cumbersome procedure. People have to go to the post office, get postal orders, post them, wait for a reply and then post again with postal orders since we usually ask for documents. Part of the purpose of imposing charges is to sift the wheat from the chaff, to get genuine well thought out requests.

This means a balance has to be struck between clarity and quality. However, this long-winded process could be shortened considerably with a reusable RTI stamp and sold at the post office. This would also save money. To process a Rs 10 postal order in 2005, it cost Rs 23. It must be more now. Another example is that the letter they send you telling you that you have to pay Rs 2 per page to get some photocopies, costs Rs 27 to post.

A simple solution is to increase the basic fee to Rs 20 and give the first 10 photocopied pages for free. This would save money and shorten the process. At the macro level, there has to be better education about the Act because most people still don't know about it while others don't realise that they have appellate authorities to go to.

source;Times of India