Auditing the Right to Information Act

The department of personnel and training (DoPT) proposes to ask the international firm PricewaterhouseCoopers to assess the efficacy of the Right to Information (RTI) Act of 2005. The RTI Act has been hard won with activists raising awareness about the issue since the 1990s. They have now criticised the government for hiring a foreign company for the evaluation and are certain that the exercise is meant to ease the discomfort that the law has generated for a secrecyloving bureaucracy.

Reacting to the DoPT’s move, the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sanghatan and the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information have formed the RTI Accountability and Assessment Group (RAAG) and will study the efficacy of the legislation themselves with the help of a grant of $ 2,50,000 from another kind of foreign organisation, the non-profit Google Foundation. The results of this study will be made public for a debate on the working of the Act.