Kashmiris demand the right to
know By Athar Parvaiz
SRINAGAR - Bashir Ahmad Malik was
flabbergasted when a helicopter carrying an Indian
official from Kashmir's summer capital of Srinagar
landed in his resident Drang village, just 17
miles (27.3 kilometers) away from its point of
departure.
The 41-year-old local, whose
village is devoid of basic amenities like clean
water and electricity, could not reconcile Chief
Minister Omar Abdullah's extravagance with the
woes of Kashmir's mostly rural population who are
struggling to survive.
"Since I am part of
the Right to Information (RTI) movement, I decided
to file an RTI application to (get details) of the
costs of the chief minister's helicopter sorties,"
Malik told IPS.
He first submitted his
request for information with the chief
minister's office in June
2011 but didn't receive a response, prompting him
to file a complaint in Kashmir's State Information
Commission (SIC), constituted under the RTI Act of
2009.
Thanks to the empowerment of
information commissions across India, Malik's
complaint yielded rapid results: within days he
was informed that the chief minister and some of
his cabinet colleagues had spent 120 million
rupees (about US$2.5 million) on helicopter
sorties in just three years.
This
expenditure is particularly significant when
viewed in contrast to the basic needs of Kashmir's
citizens.
According to the official
Economic Survey of 2011, 35% of the state's
inhabited areas are not connected to roads. The
Valley's only tertiary hospital, Sher-i-Kashmir
Institute of Medical Sciences (or SKIMS), which
caters to a population of six million people,
faces acute shortages of the most basic medical
supplies.
"We have just 10 ventilators
when we need at least 25," Dr Showkat Zargar,
director of SKIMS, told IPS.
Early this
year, as many as 378 babies died in the G B Pant
childcare hospital in three months, because of a
shortage of ventilators and warmers.
According to data from Kashmir's
department of education, 77% of schools in Kashmir
lack toilet facilities, while 64% of schools lack
drinking water facilities.
RTI
activists multiply Though Malik was not
aware of the full impact of his actions at the
time, news of his bold move traveled swiftly
across the state of Jammu and Kashmir.
The
chief minister and his cabinet have since been
forced to take bumpy car rides to far-flung
destinations, at least on some occasions.
Meanwhile, despite hurdles, villagers
throughout Kashmir are now using the RTI mechanism
to expose corruption at all levels of the
government bureaucracy, though many of those found
guilty manage to evade punishment.
In
August this year, a sarpanch (village head)
was made to refund 500,000 rupees of public funds
that he had swindled from a rural housing
development project, after Fayaz Ahmad Wani, a
local villager, exposed the scam by filing an RTI
application with the block development officer.
"I am so happy that my RTI application
brought justice to myself and my fellow
villagers," Wani told IPS.
Before the
implementation of the RTI Act in India in 2005 and
in Kashmir in 2009 - which stipulates that public
officials and authorities must respond to requests
for information within 30 days - ordinary citizens
had no channel through which to demand
transparency in government decisions or
transactions.
Prior to 2009, information
was restricted by various laws including the
Official Secrets Act (OSA) of 1923, "which is
continuing even after the British left the
sub-continent," Dr Showkat Hussain, a law
professor at the Central University of Kashmir,
lamented to IPS.
"Under the official OSA,
which allegedly deals with cases of 'espionage',
sentences (for so-called anti-national activity)
range from three to 14 years," Hussain said.
He recalled the case of the Delhi-based
Kashmiri journalist, Iftikhar Gilani, "who was
booked under the OSA in 2002 and finally only
released after a sustained campaign by human
rights activists determined that the charges
against him could never be proved."
According to Hussain, the RTI Act is the
best antidote for draconian legislature like the
OSA, since it "empowers ordinary citizens and
gives them the courage to take on bureaucrats and
politicians".
This past April, officials
in the Kupwara district announced the completion
of post-flood repairs on several irrigation
channels, in a project that cost the state $2.6
million. When a local RTI activist drew attention
to possible corruption in the scheme, inspectors
found that not a single one of the alleged repairs
had been carried out on the site.
Government skirts the law But
the Act is contingent upon the government
following its rules and guidelines.
Early
last month, State Information Commission (SIC)
officials and social activists in Kashmir accused
the Omar Abdullah government of weakening the law
by skirting and amending it at will.
Recent government amendments have "taken
the soul out of the Act and swept away our
powers," SIC Commissioner Ghulam Rasool Sofi told
IPS.
"The old rules provided (guidelines)
for the structure and functioning of the
information commission such as division of labor
and working hours. The new rules delete all these
provisions," Raja Muzaffar Bhat, one of the
pioneers of the RTI movement in Kashmir, told IPS.
"The move (goes) against the basic spirit
of transparency. This has been done just to stop
the commission from exercising its powers."
The Commission has also been divested of
its judicial powers. "Repealing this rule means
officials can simply ignore the summons and
directions of the commission," Wajahat Habibullah,
former chief information commissioner of India,
credited with drafting Kashmir's RTI Act, told
IPS.
Bhat says that the Kashmir government
has never displayed a positive attitude towards
the RTI Act.
"Despite the fact that the
Act has been in existence for three years, the
government is yet to obey one of its most basic
rules, which requires every state authority to
computerize its records and pro-actively publish
certain categories of information so that citizens
need only (go through the minimum channels) to
request that data formally," he said.
According to Pervez Imroz, a noted
human-rights lawyer, the new rules are silent
about implementation of SIC orders and appeals.
"The old rules made it binding for officials to
implement the SIC orders. But the new clause says
that citizens must go through the high court to
get an order implemented," he said, adding that
this often discourages citizens from pursuing RTI
applications.
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