Right to Information Act: Arvind Kejriwal

Arun told me on the way to the venue this morning that Arvind Kejriwal will be inducted as an AID Saathi today. The first session per agenda today is the RTI talk by Arvind Kejriwal.

• Which dept deals with the information that I need to know


• Drafting the application


• Forming the questions


• Which officer deals with this information. No one will tell you


• Submitting the application


• How to submit the Rs. 10 application fee, which account number should be used for the demand draft


• Bihar Experiment: Bihar citizens need to call the phone number and just ask for the information. Your voice becomes the RTI application. The voice is transcribed and sent. The fee is charged to your phone bill. But bureaucracy has been putting up obstacles in this process. 64 telephone exchanges exist in Bihar and not all are working or setup even 6 months after it was promised to the CM. But despite that where the exchanges work, people say things happen very fast.


• Information Commisioner: If an officer doesnt give the response in 30 days the Information commissioner needs to be informed. The officer will be penalized with a reduction in salary. There are three sets of ICs. One who have the people in their heart, one who we have to work with and one who are corrupt. It is really important to work with and encourage the first two types.


• He gave an example of a sincere and proactive IC, Vijay and two examples of how this person works and gets things done. Another person is Mr. B N Das who is a terror to the officers in the bureaucracy. Mr. O P Kejriwal is another IC who imposes strict penalties on officers that helps reforms the officers as these penalties get recorded on their career record which can really affect their career progress. But this is not without peril for such ICs. In some cases they are accused of sexual harrassment or intimidated.


• Can we encourage these information commissioners by writing to them and offering words of support? Can a movement or publicity help bring attention to the false case against Mr. O P Kejriwal?


• Next he talked about how we can engage with ICs that have a potential and who we can work with and help educate about issues and need for them to be honest, proactive and responsible.


• Central Information Commision (CIC): An experiment showed how out of 200 people who walked out of the CIC ... only 6 were satisfied with the results. He illustrated horror stories of how the CIC rejects cases with no valid reasons, how people are made to run around many many times over.


• The four questions to ask in an RTI application that are most useful: what has been done so far, who are the officers, what action is taken against the officers, when to expect my results/information?


• We need to find out which Judge is pro-RTI. 15 cases have been filed in the Delhi High Court. The first case has already been won (this was the CIC rejecting the cases with no hearing).

AID can help with

• Trying to do this across the country. One AID volunteer in various places to assess the Information Commission/ Information Commisioner in that area.


• Having a local advocate to fight cases and file cases. Even a junior advocate is fine.

The most important thing for RTI is local bodies, strengthening of local institutions. Educating local populations on what is needed. Local self governance is an important enabler for improvement of the systems. Panchayat vs other higher level of governance shows that panchayat based actions are more accountable and result oriented.

Arvind also talked about "patta" where if a person or a group of people are in a particular place for a while have a right to the land. Delhi govt. is using the divide and rule policy to raze "juggis" in various places in Delhi to prevent people from staying in those areas. Arvind extolled AID to help get all these people together and fight the unjust removal of these juggis where these people have lived for such a long time.