The right to information has both intrinsic and instrumental value. Its intrinsic value comes from the fact that citizens have a right to know. It is a crucial step towards a deeper, more meaningful democracy. More tangibly, in a country like India it can promote action for development and therefore has considerable instrumental value. Information enables people to make enlightened choices, and keep tabs on elected representatives and officials who claim to act on their collective behalf. Thus, accountability and transparency are both enhanced radically.
In the last few decades, freedom of information has been recognized as an internationally protected human right, and societies across the world have been moving away from opaque and secretive administrative systems to open and transparent systems. In fact, Sweden is supposed to have put in place the first set of laws for transparency in public affairs 200 years ago.
In liberal democracies as in dictatorships, people are routinely denied access to basic information that ought to be in the public domain. The fundamental problem is that there is no accountability in the present system of governance. All human rights depend on the basic right to know, to demand accountability. In India, the feudal social fabric has exploited the formal democratic system to its advantage because the literate are too busy building careers and empires to bother about social inadequacies. Hence, the Right to Information [hereinafter RTI] movement has a widespread appeal for everyone. In India, the fight to guarantee the right to information was taken up by illiterate villagers in the state of Rajasthan. When the govt cheated them of wages they were owed for work done during a famine in the mid-1990s, their anger and their determination to hold the government accountable sparked the RTI movement that spread across the country, finally reaching such proportions that the Indian Parliament was forced to enact a Freedom of Information Act in late 2002.
Concept of Open Government and the Right to Information: The Right to Information and Open Government are considered to be two of the most important topics in the field of Administrative Law in today's era. At the present moment, democratic countries have started laying immense importance to have an open and a transparent government.
The author submits that indeed there are quite a few things, which need to be kept confidential in the interest of public security or national interest, and sometimes, the law may impose secrecy in the interest of the individual, but secrecy should never be more than what is absolutely necessary. What is indeed necessary in a modern democracy is to draw a balance between what is 'secrecy' and 'open government' with an accent on the latter. There are a number of reasons to suggest an open government.
Primarily, participation in government by the people is regarded, as an important aspect of democracy and people cannot participate unless they have information as to what is going on in the country. A modern democratic state being answerable to the people, the people are entitled to know what policies and programmes, how and why, are being followed by the government. Another important factor justifying the openness in government activities is that, being an activist entity, the government gathers a vast arsenal of powers in a welfare state. These powers are used to affect economic interests and the personal liberty of the individual. Therefore, it is extremely essential that these powers are exercised for public good, not improperly and for the purposes of which the powers are conferred. Hence, this objective can be best ensured by giving access to the individual to governmental information and not shroud in secrecy as to how the government exercises its power in individual cases. Since power tends to corrupt, and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely , there is an inherent danger that the vast powers available to the executive may be used not for public good, but for private gain, or for corrupt motive. It is therefore essential for the people to have as much information about governmental operations as possible. This is because openness or transparency in government is bound to act as a powerful check on the abuse or misuse of power by the government. In India so far the progress towards an open government has been rather tardy. However, it may be pertinent to note that Bhagwati, J. had advised in the landmark case of SP Gupta v. Union of India, "Open Government is the new democratic culture of an open society towards which every liberal democracy is moving and our country should be no exception."
This approach was originally advocated in the landmark English case of Attorney General v. Jonathan Cape Ltd., where an action was brought for injunction to restrain the publication of the publication of the political diaries of a certain Cabinet Minister in the Labour Government of the late 1960s on the plea the publication of the diaries would reveal cabinet secrets and infringe the principle of collective responsibility of the government. In the case, it was accepted that a Cabinet Minister is indeed privy to various State secrets, and the Court should stop any improper publication of the same. However, the injunction was refused in the above-mentioned case, since the materials were about ten years old and no longer required protection under public interest. The Court had further gone on to emphasise that it should intervene, "only in the clearest of cases where the continuing confidentiality of the material can be demonstrated." |
Family-law
