12 May 2005

Right To Information Bull

The Right To Information Bill was passed today. Could this be the answer to the request in this post of mine? Can I just request Mr Saptharishi to mail me his report?

I thought reading the bill itself might give some clue. So I went searching for it. I am still doing so. I got a pdf of the original bill. But there were 146 amendments to that according to reports including The Hindu's - most of the amendments diluting the provisions of the bill apparently. I got a version from the National Advisory Council site containing the amendments proposed by it. But those are just 32 amendments. So where is the final bill as it was passed? Someone I hope is keying it in even as I type this post.

Meantime I ended up at this site of the Ministry responsible for the bill. Not finding anything much there I clicked on this - the website of the Department of Administrative Reforms & Public Grievances. Desperate by now for some kind of silver lining I clicked on the "Ideas that have worked" link there. I mean, who wouldn't? This is what I found:
Ideas that have Worked
  • Events
  • Have you noticed any ideas that have worked?
  • Have you got any idea / suggestion that may work?
I don't know what I was looking for, but this was not remotely like anything I had expected. True the Events link contained links to lectures given by eminent people on their ideas which clicked - including APJ Kalam, NR Narayanmurthy, Azim Premji and others - but nothing connected to the department or its ideas. Even ideas that failed would have been OK by me. Failure is the stepping stone etc... But no. Nothing.

As for the question at the beginning of the post: apparently yes, Mr S has to mail me the report if I ask him. After all, the Bill's objective is to:
to provide for setting out the practical regime of right to information for people to secure access to information under the control of public authorities, in order to promotetransparency and accountability in the working of every public authority
Or maybe I really need to get hold of the right Bill.

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