Right to Information

Currently, we are building up a Right to Information Help Desk on our upcoming SME portal which aims to facilitate Small and Medium Enterprises and Individuals to seek information and get justice from the right corridors.

To enable this Help Desk, I am trying to build linkages with RTI Activists across the country so that we can route the queries to respective state’s activists. The portal would act as a platform for bringing together RTI activists present across India for the social good for SMEs and helping them in getting easy access to information.

In this process, I have been talking to various activists across states and am quite motivated and enthusiastic to see how passionate they are about RTI Act and its implementation. Here, I would like to mention that most of them do it voluntarily after their office hours and take out time to bring awareness and keep the RTI flame burning.

For example, today I talked to Mr.Vikram Simha who is quite active in spreading RTI movement in Karnataka. He along with his two colleagues had set up Sakshi Trust which conducts Training Programmes on RTI for enterprises to make them aware about its magical effects.

The other day I was watching few videos on RTI and was surprised to know that the bribe business is worth 21 million rupees in India. To make people aware of RTI, a “Drive against Bribe” campaign was run across 55 cities with 1500 trained volunteers, 8 media partners and more than 700 civil society groups in July 2006. A lot of cases were solved successfully during this campaign. Representatives from Parivartan went on to the streets of East Delhi and made the citizens understand about their rights to seek information as to how their tax money is being spent, where the government is at fault and how they are being cheated. Also around 5 villages of Uttar Pradesh were benefited through RTI campaign by Kabir, an RTI Activist group. Many of the villagers problems regarding discrepancies in providing basic infrastructural facilities like ration, school uniforms, roads, etc. got resolved by filing RTI applications which forced the concerned authorities respond on the irregularities in the system. The campaign had a huge impact and villagers won the battle against the corrupt authorities and now are very well aware of the weapon called RTI.

Several cases related to land disputes, IT returns, passport irregularities, pensions, etc. where government authorities make unnecessary delays and ask for bribes can be resolved by putting the concerned departments in the dock and questioned about the irregularities in the system. It is high time that SMEs too, understand the power of RTI and use it as a tool to avoid exploitation from government bodies and public offices. RTI guarantees a person to get access to all the information and inspect any government correspondence or document, etc. until and unless there are very strong reasons to deny it. Right To Information gives its citizens a legal power to question the way of government functioning and attack the institutional impediments to openness and accountability that are still very dominant in many of the government departments.

Citing lot of discrepancies and loopholes in the operations of govt. authorities, I believe Milagrow’s RTI Help Desk would be a great tool for SMEs to get their voices heard and seek information from the concerned authorities. It is very premature to say how RTI Help Desk would fair in future but one thing is for sure that RTI Movement has to spread its wings and reach to wider audience who could use this powerful tool for their benefit. Milagrow would continue its efforts in making this movement popular and accessible to all SMEs and individuals but we would be requiring equal participation from SMEs to be more active and not hesitate to approach us for filing an RTI.