When crooks control government
The situation in India is bad. Mehul Srivastava and Andrew MacAskill report in Bloomberg BusinessWeek:
The shooter managed with one bullet what dozens of threats had failed to do: Silence Shehla Masood.
Masood, a 38-year-old businesswoman in Bhopal, used public documents obtained under India’s Right to Information Act to expose local political corruption after she kept losing on government contracts. Her still unsolved Aug. 16 murder makes her the 12th Indian killed since January 2010 after invoking the RTI to reveal wrongdoing. Although no official numbers are kept, interviews with law enforcement and victims’ families reveal at least 40 others have been beaten or attacked after filing requests under the six-year-old act.
“When applications are filed, people in government will pass the information on to criminals,” says N. Vikramsimha, a Bangalore-based trustee of the Right to Information Research Center and author of Gateway to Good Governance, a book he wrote on the measure. “The criminal bosses then come after you.”
The violence mars what may be Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s smartest strategy to fight the corruption hobbling the economy. The Right to Information Act allows citizens to ask and receive within 30 days copies of official documents and government databases. Citizens can also ask questions about official activities. Indians have filed more than 500,000 RTI requests in the 12 months through March, and the answers helped lead to the ouster of Maharashtra state’s chief minister and the arrest of three members of the organizing committee of the 2010 Commonwealth Games.
According to 2008 field experiments by Leonid Peisakhin and Paul Pinto, then doctoral candidates at Yale University, filing an RTI request is almost as effective for slum dwellers as paying a bribe to get a new ration card sooner for food and cooking supplies. “This is the most important piece of legislation passed in post-independence India,” said Subhash Agrawal, an RTI activist who successfully campaigned to make Supreme Court judges’ and ministers’ assets public. “It is a tragedy that these people have died, but it is also a sign of how powerful a tool the law is.”
For people living in remote areas, which often have few government officials, making RTI requests poses special risks, says Suhas Chakma, the New Delhi-based director of the Asian Centre for Human Rights. The official dealing with the request faces a conflict of interest in cases that reveal corruption or inefficiencies, since his own job could be jeopardized by releasing the information, he says. “The increase in violence is a direct result of people getting more and more aggressive with their requests,” says Chakma, whose organization collects data on the assaults. “In the beginning, people didn’t realize how powerful this law was. Now everybody knows, even the criminals and the corrupt.”
Eight of the 12 murdered activists lived in remote areas or towns. . .
