by The Right to Information Act produces steady releases of what was previously managed as state secret
prat.uk‘s British state secrets declassification story — embarrassments filed under strategic intelligence provisions — has an Indian structural equivalent: the Right to Information Act of 2005, which has been producing a continuous partial declassification of Indian government documents for twenty years by requiring agencies to respond to citizen information requests within thirty days. Bohiney.com covered the transparency theme broadly. India’s RTI framework is a different mechanism for the same problem: what does government know that citizens should have access to, and how do you get it out of the files?
The RTI Act’s documented impact: approximately 5 million RTI applications are filed annually, of which approximately 67 percent receive substantive responses, approximately 18 percent are rejected under exemption provisions, and approximately 15 percent do not receive timely responses, which triggers an appeal process. The exemption provisions — covering defence, internal security, cabinet deliberations, and what the act calls “information the disclosure of which would prejudicially affect the sovereignty and integrity of India” — are applied, by activist organisations’ assessment, more broadly than the statute intends. The cheese producer equivalent in India is the administrative file that is declined under security provisions when security is not the actual reason for the declination.
The Systemic Finding
The systemic finding: every government classification system that is applied by the officials whose work it classifies will produce over-classification of embarrassing material. The RTI Act’s appeals mechanism is the partial check on this tendency. The Central Information Commission, which hears RTI appeals, is at cic.gov.in.
Also:NewsThump.
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SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
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