4 NAC members send protest to Sonia: Info Bill keeps states out

Prominent members of the National Advisory Council (NAC) have shot off a letter to chairperson Sonia Gandhi, saying that the Right to Inform...

Prominent members of the National Advisory Council (NAC) have shot off a letter to chairperson Sonia Gandhi, saying that the Right to Information Bill, introduced in Lok Sabha yesterday, was against the Common Minimum Programme of the UPA since it appears to be ‘‘restricted to only the Central government and Union Territories’’ and not the states.

This comes days after the government came under fire from NAC members for introducing in Parliament a watered down version of the Employment Guarantee Bill.

In a letter to Sonia Gandhi, NAC members N C Saxena, Aruna Roy, Jean Dreze and A K Shiva Kumar have said that the RTI Bill was ‘‘a violation of the assurance given in the CMP which had stated that the Right to Information Act will be made more progressive, participatory and meaningful.’’

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The letter said that the members, who were instrumental in drafting the Bill initially, were ‘‘disturbed’’ as the final Bill ‘‘appears to be intended to be restricted to only the Central government and Union Territories.’’

‘‘This denies the very information that people actually need to hold public authorities accountable,’’ the letter stated.

The government is seeking to bring the RTI Bill to replace the Freedom of Information Act, 2002, which was applicable to the states, UTs and the Centre.

‘‘This retrograde step is all the more shocking because all the discussions we had with the Prime Minister and with you (in most of which concerned senior government officials were present), it was not clearly indicated that the government proposed to exclude the states and thereby rollback even the small amount of access that had been provided by the earlier Act,’’ the members wrote.

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‘‘We do not know whether, as chaiperson of the NAC, the government took you into full confidence about the possible implications of the Bill being restricted to the Central government.’’

They said that there was ‘‘no consitutional or legal barrier’’ against making the Bill applicable to states.

‘‘As you may recall,’’ the members said in their letter to Sonia, ‘‘the NAC recommendations sought to remove the weaknesses of the earlier law’’ but the new Bill weakened the law further.

The members also felt that the NAC recommendations on the penalty have also been changed to the extent of making the clause ‘‘ineffective.’’

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They asked Sonia to ‘‘correct’’ the anomalies of the Bill and to amend the Bill ‘‘in a transparent manner… it is only fitting that a Right to Information law is formulated in a manner that is in keeping with the spirit of the proposed law.’’

The members stressed that the matter was ‘‘crucial’’ to the implementation of the CMP and ‘‘to the effectiveness of the NAC in monitoring it.’’

‘‘These last minute changes, if retained, are bound to undermine the confidence of the people in the commitment of the government to transparency and accountability,’’ the members said.