Centre to conduct field study on RTI

 Facing criticism for trying to dilute the transparency law, the Centre will take up a “360 degree” study of the Right to Information (RTI) Act to assess information sought by applicants and cost of providing the data.

The study, “A 360 degree study on the implementation of the Right to Information Act, 2005,” will cover around 30,000 people in 22 districts of six states. It is an attempt to gauge public perception about the act’s efficacy in curbing corruption and satisfaction level among the applicants.

The Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) under the Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, wants the study to be concluded in nine months. Consultancy firms or think tanks will be entrusted with the job. The study is likely to be concluded by July 2014.

The study, which comes at a time when activists are up in arms against the government for attempting to amend the RTI Act, will comprise structured questionnaires, interviews and group discussions with various stakeholders like the RTI activists, media, civil society and the information commissioners.

Activists Aruna Roy and Nikhil Dey met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Monday to hand over a memorandum signed by one lakh people, demanding that the government should not amend and dilute the act. The government has moved amendments in Parliament to offset a CIC ruling, which brought six national parties under the ambit of the RTI Act.
Officials said the study is purported to strengthen the RTI regime as there is a need to take into account both  administrative and people’s perspective.

The exercise aims to study variety of the applications and information sought.
It will also observe the pattern of questions and classify them into personal information sought by employees, procurement related queries, information sought without any apparent objective and general information sought without specificity.

Cost incurred by the government to provide information under the RTI Act will also be studied. The study will map how an RTI application is processed and estimate “the process flow, information flow, activity times, delays and resource requirements.”
“The resources and time required for processing an application will be monetised using the time spend and imputing the person hour expenses and other tangible resources used to calculate the costs incurred in processing RTI applications,” officials said.

The study will also record the experience of public authorities at different levels in dealing with the RTI applications.