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Right to information: Making state work for the poor

Irene Khan
TWO years after Bangladesh adopted the Right to Information (RTI) Act it is time to ask whether and how well the law is working.
Described as "the sunshine law" — because it throws light on how the state governs — the right to information is recognised both as an international human right and as an essential ingredient of democracy and good governance. Today, some 90 countries/territories have RTI laws, among them India, Nepal and Bangladesh.
Information empowers people to claim their rights and better represent their interests; popular demand makes democratic government more responsive and effective. The argument for RTI is persuasive; the practice is more challenging as the case of Bangladesh demonstrates.
The RTI Act of Bangladesh, adopted in April 2009, requires public bodies and non-governmental organisations that receive or use public/foreign funding to disclose to citizens information about what they do and how they work. The Act has set up an Information Commission to ensure compliance with the law. Despite some weaknesses (such as too many exemptions from disclosure) the statute is a significant achievement in a country where administration is steeped in secrecy.
The Information Commission believes good progress is being made with thousands of requests for information having been processed, officials designated to handle these requests at the local level, a website and a mobile phone campaign to sensitise citizens on the law.
Civil society groups claim little has changed in the official culture where citizens are treated as subjects and demands for disclosure as impertinent. Most people — including some designated officials — are not aware of the law and therefore do not use it. There is considerable confusion between request for information that is publicly available and RTI disclosure. Poor government records are a major obstacle even where officials want to respond positively.
RTI is about holding the government to account, and so its successful
implementation depends on people actually using the law. Neither citizens at large nor NGOs nor the media have engaged much with the law. Why such lukewarm reception to a law that could potentially transform governance and democracy?
Unlike India, where the RTI law was the outcome of a mass movement demanding open government, in Bangladesh it was the result of pressure from a select group of civil society organisations and leaders. In that sense the RTI law is an elitist product -- and elites do not need the Act; they use their networks.
It is the poor and the disempowered that could benefit the most from RTI. But most poor people in Bangladesh do not know about the law, and if they did, would be sceptical about it. The state has constantly failed the poor — so why should they believe that if they demand information they will get it?
Or that they will not face reprisals if they dare ask a question? And even if they receive the information, the path from information to action to outcome is so arduous that even the wealthy sometimes fail — so what chance do poor people have of achieving change?
More engagement by NGOs could help to overcome the ignorance, fear and cynicism of poor people. But RTI is a double-edged sword for most NGOs who are not only its clients but also its subjects. Some NGOs fear that if they press the government, it will retaliate by using the law to expose their own weaknesses. So they keep a distance from RTI.
Besides, most NGOs in Bangladesh are service oriented. They do not understand rights and even less how RTI can be used to empower people and improve governance and democracy.
The media are ambivalent about
RTI. The process is cumbersome and many journalists can get better and faster information through their own informal channels. Indeed, some journalists pride themselves on their secret, exclusive sources. So they too have kept away from RTI.
It is against this background that the work of Research Initiatives Bangladesh (RIB) provides some interesting insights. In a year-long initiative RIB trained animators selected from marginalised communities on the RTI law. These animators then worked with their communities to create awareness and instil confidence in the people that they could use the law with results and without fear of reprisals.
These efforts generated some 230 RTI requests for information on safety net programmes, health services, land distribution, scholarships and other government services. Of these queries, 65 led to appeals at the higher level
and 15 complaints ended up with the Information Commission. In total, 45 applications succeeded in the first instance and 6 on appeal. A success rate of around 22% may not seem impressive at first sight — but for those whom the state has never acknowledged before, it has been riveting.
Furthermore, in a number of cases, when people demanded disclosure, they didn't get an answer but they got the benefit, the denial of which had motivated their query. Officials, fearful that RTI would expose their corrupt practices, pre-empted the process by conceding the benefits. Arishi community got an arsenic-free tube well; several elderly robidas, bedes and Munda persons were given old age pensions; others were enlisted for the government's homestead programme for the poor, and so on.
So, what can we learn from this exercise? The poor can ask questions — not just any question but those that
are uncomfortable and expose vested interests, and the state is compelled to respond when challenged by empowered, persistent citizens. Demand (for information) creates supply (for responsive government), and so the strategy to make RTI work has to be to generate more demand.
What organisations like RIB, Nijera Kori and some others are doing is only scratching the surface of what can potentially happen. RTI is about much more than resolving individual grievances. It is about making government open and accountable, shifting power from the ruler to the ruled and transforming the relationship between citizen and state.
In the words of Aruna Roy, a leading Indian activist,"... the right to information lets the cat amongst the pigeons, upsets comfortable but unholy alliances and opens the doors for democratic debate." In Rajasthan, where Roy worked, a demand for information about public works instigated a mass public campaign and social audits that not only challenged corruption and the arbitrary exercise of power but also created a new model of participatory democracy and political accountability of the powerful to the poor.
In Bangladesh, the first two years of RTI has demonstrated — if only in a very limited way — that individual citizens can force the state to improve its delivery. But in the next phase, if those efforts are to lead to systemic change, there needs to be a scaling up of individual requests into collective demands and mass campaigns. Just as public interest litigation has changed judicial decision-making, public interest information campaigns can energise grassroots participatory democracy and change the face of development in this country.
That will require leadership from civil society and the media. The Information Commission too will have to become more mass-oriented. Media and NGOs often criticise the democratic deficit in Bangladesh. The means for changing it is staring them in the face — will they have the courage to take it and shape it to transform democracy and development?
The writer is Consulting Editor of the Daily Star.