The
enactment of the Freedom of Information Act, 2002, since replaced
by the Right to Information Act, 2005, is an important milestone
in the citizen's struggle to secure information about the way
he is governed. It has been a long and painful struggle and
the state apparatus seems to have been embittered by it. Accustomed
to operating under the protective shadows of the Official Secrets
Act, it tends to regard the outcome as a major defeat, which
has to be avenged in a million skirmishes with the foot soldiers
of the enemy by denying them the desired information under every
conceivable pretext. Anyone who is called upon to invoke the
provisions of the RTI Act time and again will vouch for the
great ingenuity of a vast majority of the designated public
information officers in stretching the letter of the law to
deny access to the information sought. They pay scant heed to
the spirit of the legislation encapsulated in section 4 of the
Act, which mandates that every public authority shall endeavour
to provide, of its own accord, as much information to the public
as possible, so that the public have minimum resort to the use
of the Act to obtain information.
