Every year October 5-12 is being observed as the Right to Information (RTI) week across the country with the respective Information Commissions organizing workshops, seminars, press meets, competition in colleges on RTI related themes etc. The significance of this year’s RTI week is the completion of five years since the revolutionary legislation came into force. Therefore it will be good time to do an appraisal of the progress made so far in terms of public awareness, government’s responsiveness and the role of the information commissioners. As far as Nagaland is concerned, it was always going to be a big task to educate a somewhat lethargic public or get the support from an exclusive government system that thrived on secrecy. The Nagaland Information Commission (NIC) with the three commissioners has under the prevailing scenario, done a good job in establishing both the credentials of the RTI Act as well as the NIC. Led by the former Chief Secretary who knows well about the functioning of our government system, the commission has shown patience and maturity in its dealing both with the public/complainants as well as with the government machinery. One cannot expect that the RTI will bring about immediate and wholesome changes into our government’s dysfunctions. The first task is to educate the public on this very important piece of legislation so that the Act would prove beneficial for the citizens. Side by side, the Nagaland Information Commission has done well to prepare the government (administrative heads, heads of departments and other public authorities) to enable them to meet their obligations under the RTI Act. The first five years has therefore been rightly used to set the ball rolling. Much more still remains to be done. But we should be happy that the RTI regime has made a quiet start.
As we move into the next phase of the RTI journey our focus should turn to providing information as a matter of right. This means that there has to be still greater access to not just any information but ‘quality’ and relevantly useful information. It will be worth mentioning here what the new Chief Information Commissioner AN Tiwari said a few days back. His mantra was simple: ‘maximize transparency; minimize use of RTI Act’. The CIC argues that in order to make transparency regime more effective, the government should prepare a list of documents which cannot be made public and open up remaining records. Once a majority of information is made available in the public domain the use of RTI will be minimized to documents and records which have not been brought in the open category. Taking the scenario in the State of Nagaland, the government departments must ensure ready access to all relevant information. While no doubt many departments have come out with their respective RTI disclosures, at the moment, most of these are in the nature of general information and guidelines. The quality of information disclosed needs to be improved upon. The NIC should work on this aspect. In fact if we can add here, the website of the NIC is highly commendable with in-depth details of even minutes of meetings held and other relevant information on appeals & complaints and decisions & orders. This is definitely a role model web portal in the context of Nagaland and the other government departments should emulate this.
