I disagree with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s remarks legislation. By “
professional middlemen”, does the PM refers to those individuals and organisations that have been trying to get ordinary citizens—the more, the better—to use
RTI to prise information from the government?
The
RTI’s very inception owes itself to precisely such efforts. It was the sustained efforts in this regard by Anna Hazare, and others, which forced our system to make such legislation.
Aruna Roy received the prestigious Magsaysay award precisely for this effort; Arvind Kejriwal was awarded the Magsaysay this year for motivating the masses to use the
RTI to force accountability in government.
There are groups like this now in every state, all “
professional middlemen”, to whom we owe a lot of
RTI success. It is these same groups whose mobilisation of public opinion got the government to retreat on the Cabinet decision to exempt file notings from the
RTI’s ambit.
Without these “middlemen”, citizens would still be without the courage and training to use the
RTI and force accountability by civil servants.