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RTI Chief on Democracy and Bureaucracy by Krishna Pokharel


Wajahat Habibullah, India’s chief information commissioner, has a towering task. He sees to it that the government gives its citizens information they ask for under the 2005 Right to Information Act, a position that effectively makes him an umpire astride India’s mighty bureaucracy and messy democracy.

He is retiring later this month after five years in office—that’s how long the RTI law, which allows citizens to demand official documents, has been in effect. As he takes the stock of the law’s achievements and his own in the last five years, he sounds chords of both hope and discontentment.

First, hope.

“Citizens have come forward and have developed ownership of the law. They regard this law as their own and they are not willing to allow even the government, which actually brought the law, to make any changes. This is a very positive development,” said Mr. Habibullah, 64 years old, in an interview with India Real Time. He spent close to four decades in India’s bureaucracy before his appointment to the current post.

But his hope quickly gives way to the lingering discontent. Mr. Habibullah says the RTI law is mainly used by citizens in metropolitan cities and large towns but it’s less used in small towns and in rural areas, where awareness about the law is “abysmally low.”

“The main purpose of this law is to spread the enjoyment of democracy to the common citizen who is the most distant and least influential of our citizens,” says Mr. Habibullah. “That purpose has not been met.”

The reason is the government’s own reluctance to apply the law to itself, he says. He points to the section 4 of the law which makes it mandatory for every government office to proactively disclose through office websites and posters information a host of information: on its main functions; on officers; on the details of the budget allocated to it; on proposed expenditures; on concessions and permits granted; on the monthly income of its officers and employees – and to update that information every year.

“This information is about all kind of routine works which the office does about which normally questions arise,” Mr. Habibullah says. While some government offices like the Supreme Court and both Houses of Parliament have been exemplary in complying with the proactive disclosure provision, government offices in general are not fully implementing it, Mr. Habibullah says.

(The law says government offices should provide as much information as possible without citizens asking for it so that “the public have minimum resort to the use of this Act to obtain information.”)

The government’s reticence portends grim consequences for the future of the law itself.

“My fear is that if general awareness about the law expands dramatically and this basic disclosure has not kept pace then we will face a breakdown because government will then not be able to handle the number of applications that will come,” Mr. Habibullah says.

Government offices already are getting swamped with information requests. According to the Central Information Commission, the 1,840 federal government ministries, departments and public-sector companies received more than 500,000 RTI requests in the year that ended March 31.

That is a three-fold increase from three years ago. Mr. Habibullah says most of these requests are already covered by the requirements under section 4 and citizens and public information officers shouldn’t have had to waste time in demanding the information.

Mr. Habibullah’s explanation: “The structure of our bureaucratic system is one that was designed to feed, to service an Empire. It is not really designed to service a democracy.”

He recounts his own training as a young bureaucrat when officers were taught “that information that you have is held in trust for the government and therefore must never be disclosed.”

Contrast that with the emphasis on disclosing information in today’s RTI era.

“Now, you have a highly dynamic law superimposed on this old bureaucratic structure so that bureaucratic structure is going to take time to adapt,” Mr. Habibullah says.

He adds: “The paradox is that on the one hand government is keen to make everything transparent and accountable. On the other hand when it’s a question of you being transparent and accountable, then you develop cold feet.”

There is another paradox in the recent murders of RTI activists, Mr. Habibullah says. “When the government is the one that has been asked to give the information then how can you ask the government to give you protection if you are harassed and threatened for asking information?” he says in the context of the murder of RTI activist Amit Jethava in July.

The optimist in Mr. Habibullah resurfaces.

“India is a nation of paradoxes,” he says. “And these are not insuperable paradoxes.