It has been more than two years since the Right to Information Act (RTI) came into force in October 2005.

Immediately after its enforcement, a concern was expressed in certain quarters about adequate efforts not being made by all concerned to implement the Act in its true spirit.

But in this, all people failed to realise that the Act would take some time before starting to work to its potential.

And it was not very late before people actually started realising the import and power of the right emanating from the Act.

While there were very few petitions seeking information under RTI to begin with, today there seems to be a deluge of such requests. It has not only resulted in increased confidence among the general public about the utility of RTI, the same has also made the different government departments more transparent and accountable than they had ever been.

Consequent to sundry appeals for information under RTI, many path-breaking decisions and judgements by the Central Information Commission and various State Information Commissions have resulted in substantive dilution of the draconian Official Secrets Act, 1923 which had been the last resort of a reluctant bureaucrat.

Even though today the right to seek information under RTI has become a powerful tool for exercising one’s democratic rights, one feels that still a lot needs to be done to further strengthen and reinforce this right before it can really become a genuine weapon of popular control exercising benign influence over different government bodies.

The price to seek and obtain information has been made prohibitive by many government agencies defeating the very intents and purposes of RTI. Since it has been left to various state governments and autonomous governments bodies to frame such rules relating to the various charges for information sharing, they have found an excuse in the same by way of making it ridiculously high.

While these prohibitive costs to seek information do discourage non-serious information seekers, they also repel the many genuine ones who are not well-off enough to be able to foot the bill for the purpose. Though there are specific provisions in the Act about the inadvisability of charging anything from people below the poverty line, one has to understand that there are many millions others who, even though above the poverty line, are no better.

Since there have been many landmark judgements by now wherein specific pecuniary penalties have been imposed upon many government servants for deemed deliberate failure to provide information in time and since such penalties have to  be borne from one’s own pockets, government staff and officers are found to be on their toes now to attend to such requests and provide the desired information within the statutory 30 days’ period as per the Act.

Today, when many government departments and bodies are already reeling under the shortage of staff and officers in these times of downsizing and rationalising, the normal functioning of these departments and bodies are severely getting hampered. As non-compliance under the Act results in personal financial loss including the fear of departmental proceedings, a government official is more than keen to attend to RTI requests before anything else.

Some of these problems have arisen also because of the fact that many government organisations have still not put the requisite in-house information into the public domain as they are supposed to do under RTI. This also results in delay or outright refusal in furnishing of the desired information to the petitioners.

Not only this, many government departments and bodies have still not notified the Assistant Public Information Officer (APIO), Public Information Officer (PIO) and the Appellate Authority (AA) as warranted by the Act. This has resulted in many such RTI petitions being shuffled around among various government departments and officers on the pretext that one has not been notified as APIO, PIO or AA to be able to entertain such a petition or that the desired information is not readily available in sharable form frustrating the purpose of the Act further.

There is an urgent need to do some serious thinking as far as implementation of the Act is concerned. All the government organisations should not only put all the permissible information pertaining to their establishments in readily sharable form, they should also immediately notify and properly publicise the APIO, PIO and AA for accessing information relating to their offices.

In fact, it is proposed that as far as possible, a self-contained office should have APIO, PIO and AA in the same premises. Moreover, the central and state governments should make further clarifications to ensure that the cost of seeking and obtaining information under RTI does in no case become prohibitive. Also, the entire process of moving an RTI application has to be further simplified. The phone-in system, as instituted in Bihar and other states, should now be extended to rest of the country. This avoids a common citizen several trips to the government office.

If we are able to modify and further refine the Act and related implementation mechanism, one is sure that the powers granted to a common citizen here shall go a long way in strengthening and reinforcing our democratic foundations.

(The writer is an IAS officer, working as an Additional District Magistrate, Hooghly in West Bengal.)