The Right to Information Act which came into force on October 12, 2005, was enacted to ensure transparency and accountability in governance. But the manner in which the government has been subtly subverting the RTI Act is a matter of concern.
The judiciary needs to step in to ensure that the government complies with the mandate of the RTI Act. But with the courts also averse to parting with information and with its functioning largely under a veil of secrecy, we are stonewalled.
But we need to battle it out and cannot allow the RTI Act to be choked by the government to a slow death. Steps need to be taken to strengthen the transparency regime that was sought to be established as envisaged by this Act. Effective implementation of the RTI Act requires political commitment from the very top. Officials denying information or giving misleading and distorted information need to be severely penalized.
Governance by the cloak of secrecy and opaqueness needs to be strongly resisted. It cannot be a hush-hush regime. We need to dismantle those walls of secrecy that continue to hound transparency and good governance. In those very words of Narendra Modi ‘Sabko sanmati de bhagwan’ (Let good sense prevail).
