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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | There's a 'Bizarre', Incomplete Logic to Amended RTI Act -Wajahat Habibullah

There's a 'Bizarre', Incomplete Logic to Amended RTI Act -Wajahat Habibullah

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published Published on Jul 25, 2019   modified Modified on Jul 25, 2019
-Newsclick.in

The amendments contradict the federal nature of the Act, and end up violating the PM’s principle of cooperative federalism.

Information is the currency that every citizen requires to participate in the life and governance of society
—AP Shah, former Chief Justice, Delhi and Madras High Courts, 2010.

It is not just Shah but many justices of the High Courts and the Supreme Court, who have repeatedly stressed that the right to information is a cornerstone of democracy. Take the words of PN Bhagwati, the former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He said in 1981 that in a society that has chosen to accept democracy as its “creedal faith”, the citizens ought to know what their government is doing.

Long before Bhagwati, in 1975, Justice KK Mathew, former judge of the Supreme Court, said that people have “a right to know every public act, everything done in a public way by their public functionaries. They are entitled to know the particulars of every public transaction in all its bearings.”

It is the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government which had initiated the process for a law that would govern a citizen’s right to know. The Freedom of Information Act, 2002, floated during the term of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, was the precursor to the Right to Information or RTI Act, which was passed in Parliament in 2005.

The current NDA government, in its third term in office, is trying to encroach upon the very right that citizens have got as part of a process that it had started. It is encroaching on this right by bringing an amendment to the RTI Act that determines the salaries, allowances and tenures fixed for Information Commissioners at the Centre and in the states.

The amendments to the Act proved to be a rare occasion in Parliament where a vote and subsequently a division were required to merely table a Bill. In the end, 224 Members of Parliament (MPs) approved the Bill in the Lok Sabha. Going by this vote, and the composition of the House, the Bill was all set to be passed on July 23, which it did amidst an uproar in the Lok Sabha.

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Newsclick.in, 23 July, 2019, https://www.newsclick.in/Bizarre-Incomplete-Logic-Amended-RTI-Act?fbclid=IwAR3YSLtgHizihZe_lAakTSda2exXKFD_PYmYg6jgTX1J5WhRvLstNgTWuKg


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