February 3, 2012, 9:00 AM IST
Delhi Journal: How the RTI Act Makes Us All 'Babus'
By Tripti Lahiri
If you miss the days of pen pals and rue the fact that you never get
any letters any more, there's a simple solution: File a
Right-to-Information request with the Delhi Development Authority, or
another municipal agency in the capital that has anything to do with
land.
The volume of return mail you'll get will make it worth your while to
invest in a good, old-fashioned letter-opener (for those born after
the Internet, see here.)
My main experience of using the RTI came while seeking information
from the DDA and the Municipal Corporation of Delhi for a story about
housing in the city. Now that much time has passed, I am able to
remember it somewhat fondly as a rather wonderful example of the
almost artistic fashion in which government agencies can follow the
letter — literally — rather than the spirit of the law.
Because it can be quite difficult to get timely interviews with
officials in municipal agencies, particularly when you make it clear
that you plan to quote them by name and record the interview, using
the RTI Act seemed like the way to go. Once it was in writing, it
would be harder to dispute later.
So in 2009, I filed a bunch of requests — relating to land
acquisition, the price of land and slum evictions — with the DDA,
which is the city's largest land-owning agency and one of its biggest
builders of housing. I also filed requests with the MCD, which handles
much of the city's day-to-day services, and has a special wing devoted
to slums.
Since the best chance of getting a speedy response is to direct your
letter to the right department, you need to spend time deciphering
these agencies' internal hierarchies and acronyms. This is about as
much fun as being hit repeatedly on the head with a sandbag. For the
DDA, for example, you'll find a list of public information officers
under the "About Us" section on its website. These days, there are no
less than 76 information officers, with obscure titles like "dy
director LAB" or "dy director LSB" that are of little use to most
people trying to figure out where a letter should go. The MCD's list
of information officers, meanwhile, spans three pages under 49
different headings.
I did my best, at times with additional guidance from DDA staff who
said they could figure out where my letters should go. But judging by
what happened next, they were as baffled as I was when it came to
knowing how the agency worked, and who handled what.
I had, at worst, expected dead silence in response. Instead, I found
myself embroiled in correspondence that seemed destined to continue
for years. Many read like this September 2009 letter, sent in response
to a July 2009 information request:
"Please refer to your letter No. F.8(815)09/RTI/LM/WZ/359 dated
15.7.09 vide which para No. 13 has been forwarded to AO Land Costing
Deptt. for furnishing the reply directly to the applicant. In this
connection it is intimated that such like information as asked for in
para No. 13 is not maintained and therefore is not available in the
Land Costing Wing."
An RTI request pertaining to a Commonwealth Games Village bid led
over 40 pieces of correspondence over six months. Above, a
construction site of Delhi's Commonwealth Games village.
Understanding that required developed code-cracking skills. Here, "LM"
refers to Land Management, the branch where I must have originally
sent the request, and "WZ" stands for West Zone." I'm guessing "F.8″
is Folio 8, the number given to my letter, 815 might be the date by
which I was owed a reply and 09 is the year. As for "359," I still
don't know.
Many other letters were merely to inform me that, yet again, I had
sent my request to the wrong branch of the DDA and they were
forwarding it to another department that was likely, eventually, to
tell me something similar. Take this one, sent to me in July 2009 in
response to a June 3 request.
"On the basis of report of revenue staff, the parawise reply is given as under:
1. This matter does not pertain to this office. It pertains to Zorth Zone."
2. -do- [ditto]
3. -do-."
And so on.
In one case, an official ended his letter to the person to whom he had
forwarded my request in an alarmingly open-ended fashion:
"In case, it does not fall under your jurisdiction, it may please be
further transferred to Public Authority to which the subject matter is
more closely connected, directly."
After a while, I started to think of my letters as the refugees of the
correspondence world, wandering from one desk to another, in search of
a home. It's possible, of course, that the confusion about where these
information requests should go wasn't purely the result of stalling
tactics. According to a post on the website of the transparency group
Accountability Initiative, "the most surprising thing about
applications to the DDA is that its pretty evident that a lot of DDA
officials are using the RTI to settle intra/inter-departmental issues
and raising questions about the general functioning of the DDA."
The DDA didn't respond to requests for comment.
My experience submitting RTI requests to the MCD was relatively
painless and quite speedy, to my surprise. But other people report
having the sort of tooth-pulling time that I came to associate with
the DDA. Suresh C. Gupta, a former employee at the Ministry of
Consumer Affairs, blogs at Infopower about his experiences with the
RTI Act. In an interview this week, he said he was pleased to find out
that he could submit his request to the MCD online. But his pleasure
soon vanished.
"You pay your 10 rupees [20 cents] with credit card… and it goes to 24
or 25 departments," he said. "So all the 20 or 25 departments are
responding. They drive the applicant crazy. They all send letters
saying 'This has nothing to do with our department.'"
In one case, he got a slightly more informative letter from an
official at the MCD when he reached the appeals stage (when your query
hasn't been answered in 30 days, you can file a first appeal; when the
first appeal receives no response in 30 days, you file a second
appeal). The official told Mr. Gupta that he had never received the
initial query because no computer had yet been installed in his
office. The first appeal letter, which was internally forwarded, was
the first he had heard of Mr. Gupta's request.
Yogender Singh Mann, the spokesman for the MCD, told India Real Time
that queries pertaining to just one department were "catered to quite
quickly."
The agency received about 75,000 RTI requests in 2011, of which 90%
"were satisfied" while 10% went into the appeals process, Mr. Mann
said.
RTI requests that spanned departments were more likely to get bogged
down, he added.
"The MCD is a huge organization, which covers 1,397 square kilometers.
There are more than 50 departments," he said. "No one can give the
information of another department."
Over time, and after an appeal on occasion, I did get a lot of the
information I was seeking. In some cases, I was asked to come in to
pick up photocopies or look through documents at particular offices,
but these were rarely the departments I would have first thought of
contacting.
So in the end, was it worth using the RTI route with these agencies? Absolutely.
Here's the post-mortem on the DDA experience. I began with five RTI
requests that asked a little over 40 questions in total. I later filed
another request with some other questions relating to the Commonwealth
Games Village bid.
In return, I received about 40 pieces of correspondence over a period
of six months. Where they forwarded my requests to the government of
Delhi or other departments, I got a few more letters.
In all, these letters provided concrete information for about half my
questions. Many of the responses were provided by one stellar DDA
office that answered the questions clearly and with very helpful
detail, but I won't name the branch since I'm not entirely certain
whether this shout-out will bring the department censure or praise.
The sometimes circuitous route my letters traveled also ended up
providing helpful information unexpectedly, often revealing the total
lack of coordination between agencies and branches. In one case, two
different departments responded to the same query about the
documentation required for an evicted slum family to get compensation.
One branch said the family must provide an original ration card — an
exceedingly precious document that provides proof of address and
entitles families to subsidized food — which they would then cancel to
prevent "misuse." But another branch said it only required a photocopy
of one of a series of government-issued ID cards, so families in that
area needn't hand over or lose their precious ration cards. The
possibility that the DDA would have different paperwork requirements
in different parts of the city to obtain the same housing benefit
wouldn't have occurred to me, and probably wouldn't have emerged in an
interview.
But along the way, I noticed a disturbing side-effect of this battle
of wits. In an effort to pre-empt the way in which a bureaucrat might
interpret, mis-interpret, or wiggle out of responding fully, I began
trying to frame my questions in a way that I hoped would close off all
avenues of evasion. Instead of a straightforward query, my questions
began sprawling into a confusing series of clauses and sub-clauses
(something like "If the answer to Question 1, part (a) subsection
(iii) is "not available" please explain in detail why not," etc.) that
any babu, as bureaucrats are colloquially called, would be exceedingly
proud of having composed.
I suspect that other frequent users of the RTI Act have done the same,
attempting to mind-meld with the faceless file-pusher who might end up
handling one's request. In the quest for transparency, perhaps we must
all become bureaucrats now.
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