The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : Despite RTI Act, officials stonewall information seekers

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Sunday, May 03, 2009
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Karnataka

Karnataka - Bangalore

Despite RTI Act, officials stonewall information seekers

Staff Reporter

A group of journalism students took up an investigative project

It took 23 visits to get information on Chief Minister’s temple visits
Only the Lokayukta office was cooperative and willing to give data

BANGALORE: A team of journalism students investigating various issues discovered that it was not easy to source information under the Right to Information Act.

With the exception of the Lokayukta office, students of the Indian Institute of Journalism and New Media were either turned away or given responses as late as three months after information was sought.

Sample this. Peeved with increasing number of news reports on Chief Minister B.S. Yeddyurappa’s temple visits, P. Krishnamurthy and Pavan Kumar H. sought official records and expenditure details on the subject. “We found 23 such visits reported in newspapers from May 30 to November 15, but the RTI response mentioned only nine,” he said.

Further, the RTI revealed that the Chief Minister spent over Rs. 11 lakh government funds. This piece of “partial information” took 12 visits to the Chief Minister’s Special Officer in the Vidhana Soudha over three months, Mr. Kumar added.

BMTC accidents

Tackling the issue of mounting numbers of accidents involving BMTC buses, another group filed an RTI application in November. One month later, students were told that the “RTI application was misplaced”. Shockingly in January, a second application met with a similar fate. “We had to approach the appellate authority only to find that out of 500 fatal accidents from 2000 to 2008, 317 occurred due to driver negligence,” said Urmi Misra. However, of the 317 only 35 drivers were dismissed. Twenty-eight drivers were involved in more than one fatal accident.

While the story behind every project pointed to the “obvious loopholes” in the system, the institute’s visiting professor and Pulitzer award-winning journalist Ralph Frammolino said these stories point to the difficulties in obtaining information.

Poor punishment

Students Manasi Phadke and Brenton Cordeiro said their task was the easiest with Lokayukta being “most co-operative”. “In this case, the intention was to show that although this office is a bully pulpit and its actions may act as deterrent, the complaints and raids do not always translate into action,” said Mr. Frammolino.

The RTI revealed that less that one per cent of 26,000 complaints resulted in verified punishments.

Mr. Frammolino, who guided the investigative group “I-team”, pointed out that the RTI filed with the Department of Public Instruction and block-level education offices failed to fetch desired results.

“They are not upfront about who’s on leave, and many offices have not given us any reply to date,” said Anirban Sen.

“We asked for 100 teachers with highest absentee records and they gave us 10. And when we asked primary data of the SSA 2008 survey, we were turned away,” added Krishna Merchant, who worked in the same team.

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