`Right to information will check corruption'

By The HINDU -Kalpana Sharma


MUMBAI, FEB. 23. The Magsaysay Award winner, Aruna Roy, drew a parallel today between activists and journalists and said, ``If you want to get to the truth, you face the same problems we face.'' Ms. Roy was speaking on `Media and the Right to Information' at the invitation of the Network of Women in Media in Mumbai.

Her comment followed a moment's silence that the gathering observed for the recently slain South Asia bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal, Daniel Pearl, who had been based in Mumbai for more than a year. News about his death has shocked many journalists in this city who had come to know Pearl and his wife, Mariane, a French television journalist. Ms. Roy pointed out that both journalists and activists had to ``fight for democratic spaces'' and that the line separating them was a thin one.

Against the background of her struggle for the right to information in Rajasthan with the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), she said that this right was aimed at ending the arbitrary use of power. Their campaign had demanded transparency of official records, a social audit of Government spending and a redressal machinery for people who had not been given their due. As a result of this struggle, not only did Rajasthan pass a law on the right to information but in a number of panchayats, graft had been exposed and officials punished.

Ms. Roy said that although several other States, including Maharashtra, had passed right to information laws, many of these were defective. Only in Goa was there a law which came close to the consensus draft that the National Campaign on the Right to Information had submitted. A central law has not seen the light of day. None of the laws covered other organisations, besides the Government, which handle public funds. None had penalties for officials who defied provisions of the law and refused to part with information. And there was no appellate authority outside the Government to deal with complaints. As a result, people could not demand and get information on a range of issues that should be a part of the public domain.

Speaking of how the right to information could curb corruption, she said, ``Defying all laws of gravity, money flows upwards.'' She said that their experience in Rajasthan had revealed that panchayats with the largest budgets were also those with the greatest misappropriation of funds. ``No corruption can take place without the connivance of the bureaucracy,'' said this former bureaucrat.

Ms. Roy urged the media to use the laws where they existed. ``The devil is in the details'', she said and that the press would get the real story only when it had the right to scrutinise the details in Government records and documents. She said the press was used to accessing information through ``sources''. But this became a system of obligation and patronage, whereas information about how public funds are used should be a basic right which any citizen, as well as members of the Fourth Estate, should be entitled to access.