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The RTI battle of the NRIs
US-based
NRIs wanted information on Nandigram but Indian embassy was stumped
 New Delhi: The
NRIs in the US have been leading a campaign for their right to use
the Right to Information Act from abroad even as the government
admits their “issue” is complex” and may need an amendment in the
law.
Take the case of
73 young NRIs across the
US
who, on November 15, 2007, jointly wrote to the Indian Embassy at
Washington DC for information through RTI on the Nandigram violence.
They wanted to know the death toll and access the correspondence
between the state government and the Ministries of Home and External
Affairs. Five days later, the Embassy sent a non-committal reply:
“The information is not available with us”.
“We tried to
explain about the spirit of the Act and our difficult situation of
not being able to file an RTI without the Embassy’s assistance, but
to no avail,” recounts Somasundaram Kumaresamuthusamy, one of the
applicants.
Or the case of
Arun Gopalan, based in Montgomery Village in Maryland, who was asked
to re-direct his RTI application on the annual water accounts of
Narmada Basin to the “Public Information Officer concerned”.
“I filed an RTI
application with the Home Department, Government of Maharashtra. The
application required a court fee of Rs 10, which I could not procure
here in the US. My friend did not put the stamp on the appeal and as
a result my appeal was not processed. Thus the lack of mechanism to
pay fee from the US is a major hindrance to my ability to seek
information,”
Los Angeles
resident Vishal Kudchadkar informs Minister of Overseas Affairs
Vayalar Ravi in a letter dated June 22.
NRIs, with
meagre help from overseas public authorities, remain largely
clueless on basic information required for filing an RTI application
— from paying the Rs 10 fee to keeping abreast of the different
payment modes varying from state to state.
An RTI
application filed with the Indian Embassy in the US by Commodore
(retd) Lokesh Batra shows the downslide with only 44 applications
filed in 2007, 27 in 2008 and none till January 2009. The number of
appeals filed with the Embassy is five in 2007, four in 2008 and
none till January 2009.
An October 6,
2009, response by Debraj Pradhan, Central Public Information Officer
and Joint Secretary, Ministry of External Affairs to Kudchadkar
says, “The Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs informed that they
did not have any information, the Department of Personnel and
Training responded stating that ‘no policy, rules, regulations and
procedures exist under the RTI Act, 2005, to facilitate NRIs to file
RTI applications to public authorities in India from abroad’.”
Central
Information Commissioner Wajahat Habibullah says NRIs can better
participate in RTI if an amendment is made in the rules to name the
“Ministry of Overseas Affairs as the nodal authority to monitor RTI
applications from NRIs”. The applicants currently can file the
application fee in the currency of the nations in which they reside.
The applications can be submitted with the respective embassies, but
a proper mechanism through the amendments has to be worked out for
processing the requests. I found the MEA not the right authority to
entertain applications,” Habibullah says. But Vishal disagrees with
Habibullah, and feels a “simple gazette notification” would do.
“Under Section 26 (3)(c)(h)(i) of the Act, the government is
empowered to update guidelines on the manner in which requests for
access to information shall be made to a Public Information Officer,
the notices for fees to be paid and for any additional regulations
or circulars. Hence the concerns of the NRIs can be addressed by a
simple gazette notification,” his e-mail to Pradhan on October 7
says. The DoPT now also says that the RTI Act would need an
amendment for NRIs.
21
October 2009
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