Man-Men to Social Group to Civil Society

 

Right To Information and Citizen’s Charter.

Model Of Open Government System

(Sujit Narayan Chattopadhyay)

The Open Government System emphasise on an important aspects:

Build an environment of confidence among citizens in the accuracy of Information, which government holds through legislative or administrative action, providing the public with :

a)     The right to access to all non-personal information held by government which does not endanger the national security, law enforcement or free trade.

b)     The right of access to personal information for the persons concerned, so that facts may be verified and the information amended if it is inaccurate.

c)     Improvement of the transparencies of the Government. The important hinge to believe the transparencies of Government is its detailing about the financial expenditure. The attempt of the Government should be to make the people in a manner which an interested member of the public can understand.

The traditional hallmark of Public Administration was its transparency. This transparency obviously strengthen the base of democracy. Specially in a democratic society, it is not expected that the Administration and its activities will be implemented secretly without any prior information to the larger society. During colonial period the administration was run under the Official Secret Act of 1923 which was later made stiffer by the National Government in the year 1967.

But now the situation has qualitatively transformed. The official Secret Act has recently been replaced by a new Right to Information Act. This step is no doubt an improvement over the past, but this improvement can only then be fulfilled when this Right will be included with provisions of Fundamental Rights of our Constitution.

Right to Information:

The success of Democracy does not only depends on its ruling structure, that is its system of Parliamentary Representation. Its optimum success depends on the meaningful participation of the people in the affairs of State. But this meaningful participation will only be perfect for development of democratic culture, when the standard of performance of the Government will be clearly visible to the Citizen. The visibility of improvement of Governmental performance depends on its activities related with the delivery of public goods and services to citizen group. So this may be said that the freedom of information. The freedom information is directly related to the connotation of democratic rights of the people. The democracy and information are two essential wings of Governmental accountability. These two wings ultimately ensured ‘freedom of expression’ and ‘freedom of thought. These two maintain a desired continuum in the way establishing new sets of democratic rights of people. This is also used as bedrock of modern democracy.  Traditionally the most quintessential (সুক্ষ্ণ) demands to the democracy can only meet up with (1) Participation of the People with the government; (2) Transparencies of the ruling motive; (3) Accountability to the people at large.

Even in today’s democracy, the electorate expects that he would be given the opportunity to choose his domain of opinion fearlessly. It leads to empowerment as the process of democratization is intrinsically (অন্তর্নিহিতভাবে) related with decentralization of government.

Dispersal of governmental power has become an essential part because that enables the people to rule by themselves. Thus we must admit that dispersal of power has an essential precondition. The dispersal of power in the local level is only possible when the dispersal (বিচ্ছুরণ) of information and knowledge of ruling are successfully reached to the people.

But there are some fields of governmental operation where the public in general are still not allowed to pick, these are like a)Official Secret Act 1923; b) The Indian Evidence Act 1872; Code of Civil procedure 1908; the Central Civil Service (Conduct) Rules 1964. Here naturally the allocation of decision are not put to test of public accountability.

The right way of establishing the “Right to Information Act” will only be enabled when such unnecessary and unreasonable Acts will bring into the scrutiny.

Some Positive Steps   

1)     Some positive steps for materialising the right to information has been incorporated in our Constitution. Like “Supremacy of judiciary”; “The idea of Lokpal and Lok Ayukt” as a part of the Ombudsmen; even in many respect the popular lower house of the Parliament impose control over the Executive. Later the Constitution has also incorporated with it the Panchayati Raj system, which brings the decentralization of Central and State authority over the Local Politics.

2)     The proposed freedom of Information Acts will only serve to concretise these endeavours in the framework of legal and constitutional norms. The need for such a norm has been realized from time to time.

3)     The transparencies also mean that all decisions are reasoned and contain an innate logic. In the well known S.P.Gupta vs, Union of India (AIR 1982, Sc149), popularly known as Judges Transfer Case, the Supreme Court had held that no democratic government could survive without accountability and the basic postulate of accountability is that the people should have information about the functioning of the government.

With this understanding, a working group on the Right to Information and Promotion of open and transparent government was set up in 1997 by the Ministry of Personnel to examine the feasibility of such an Act as also the necessary amendments to the various Acts. A draft freedom of information Bill was prepared in May 1997 and it was circulated in the Chief Ministers’ Conference held in May 1997. There was a broad consensus in favour of such a legislation. But our later experience also shows that such legislative guarantee of the right to freedom of information would not be much help unless the public functionaries are sensitised, motivated and trained to accept the chage towards openness and citizens become aware and willing to play a more proactive role with necessary intervention of the civil society organization.

Accountability of public functionaries should be ensured at all levels of governmental system through appropriate legislative and administrative measures. It needs to be hardly emphasised that transparencies and accountability would help in minimising corruption in public life.  

One of the fundamental preconditions of good governance is the right to information. Good governance cannot be brought about unless masses are make aware of their right and bureaucrats are made accountable to their deeds.

Secrecy encouraged lacking of accountability. This lack of accountability brings corruption as a cancer to the Governmental machinery.

Citizen’s Charter:-

The instrument of citizen’s charter is used in some countries to make the government accountable and answerable to the citizens. Because citizen’s Charter used as benchmarks against which its performance can be evaluated by the end users of the society.

But unfortunately there are certain defects in preparation and submission of Charter of demands to the Government:-

1)     Most of the Charters have been prepared without a throughgoing analysisof the existing crisis of the ground.

2)     There is hardly any consultative process with the staff and as a result they have no mental involvement in or commitment to the Charter.

3)     Copies of the Charter are often not available to the members of the public.

4)     The charter do not provide for any compensation to the members of the public for not getting the service within the stipulated time or of the promised quality and standard.

5)    Thus it gradually becomes a hollow promise without any sanction.

Basic Character of Charter:-

1)     The charter is a device to build mutual trust in the citizen administration relationship.

2)     The aim of the Charter is to place demand to the Government and other social and economic service organiztion.

3)     The Citizen’s Charter demands assurance from the Government to make its administration effective, responsive in order to restore the faith of the people to the Government.

4)     It attempts to create an atmosphere, where the administration remain bound to increase their capacity in handling the citizens.

The Charter is no doubt an innovative device but its formulation and enforcement are no easy tasks. Fairly quantifiable standard of performance have to be set. There has to be some body or authority to monitor performance. The Citizens have to play an active role in giving timely and necessary feedback about services rendered by government agencies.

In November 1996, Prime Minister inaugurated a conference of the Chief Secretaries on an agenda for an effective and responsive administration in order to restore the faith of the people in the fairness and capacity of the administration at different levels. It was admitted that the public agencies had been inward looking and were alienated from the people. The government of India has since introduced citizen’s Charter in number of departments, like Income Tax,  LIC, The Railways, the CPWD etc. As explained by the government, the charter places the citizen at the centre of administration.