A couple of months ago, I had a very modest debut with the Right to Information Act. The information I sought was rather innocuous. The road just outside the housing society where I live doesn't look as if it has been repaired in several years. It is studded with potholes and on a rainy day particularly, one can easily trip and fail. So I educated myself about the correct procedure to write an RTI application, and asked a very simple question - 'When was the road in question last repaired and at what cost? '.
Having typed the query up and paid the necessary fees, I sent off my query to the concerned officer for a reply. After some days, when I chanced across an official looking letter in my mail, I perked up to see that my question had been answered so quickly. However, on opening the envelope and reading the contents, I was left disillusioned. The letter mentioned that the RTI application had been sent to the wrong person and so he was forwarding to the right person as per the requirement of the RTI Act. That was a bit disappointing but still there was satisfaction because there had been some sort of a response and that too pretty quick.
Another week or so went by and another letter came. Again, I opened it with the same level of enthusiasm and again the contents were the same. The second officer had replied in the same tone – that he wasn’t the correct person and so was forwarding it to a third person. By this time, all possible options had been exhausted and it was clear that the third officer was indeed the person from whom the reply had to come and so eagerly I looked forward to a reply in the next week or so. But I have been waiting for a long time now and no reply has come so far. It seems that the people whose responsibility it wasn’t to provide a response were quick to say so and pass the buck, but when it came to the one man whose job it was to reply, there was and is an inexplicable delay.
Are delays part of Indian DNA? They seem to be everywhere. Long delays in regulatory clearances have slowed down the infrastructure sector in India. Delay in environment clearances have proved expensive for the roads sector. In Mumbai, many infrastructure projects, including monorail and metro rail projects are facing delays. Similarly, one of the major flaws of India is the delay in its legal system. Over two million cases are pending in 18 High Courts alone and more than 200,000 cases are pending in the Supreme Court for admission, interim reliefs or final hearing. Normally, it takes five to fifteen years for a case to be decided in an Indian Court.
So, it is welcome news that institutionally, the government has now chosen to act on these chronic delays by giving approval, in principle, to a bill providing for time-bound delivery of services like pensions, passports, caste certificates, death certificates, ration cards and tax refunds, among others, to the citizens. Defaults will attract a penalty of Rs 250 a day subject to a maximum of Rs 50,000.
The planned legislation, fronted by Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances, also fiats a public authority to set up a call center, customer care center, help desk and people's support system to guarantee time- bound provision of services. It also pursues establishment of public grievance redressal commission at the Centre and every state. The move, therefore, is really to introduce a “Right to Action” Bill along the lines of the Right to Information Act. The only fear is that like the Information under the Right to Information Act is subject to delays, in spite of such a Citizen’s charter being passed, delays will remain endemic to India.
