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RTI Clinic | SICHREM | R Manohar | Anti-Corruption Group | Coalition Of Civil Society | Community

RTI clinic to help Bangaloreans get their right

A group of human right activists conduct RTI Clinic in Bangalore to help citizens deal with RTI related queries.

RTI Clinics are held every month in Bangalore

If you are a Bangalorean and caught up with the know-how of Right to Information Act (RTI), there is a ‘clinic’ to help you get to the right place in right the time. For almost two years now, a group of activists from across the city are conducting ‘RTI Clinic’ in order to make a better use of RTI and help people get proper access to RTI. In February’s Clinic, a few people came from Ragigudda slums asking for solutions to their various problems and how to get information regarding them, said S Anand, an independent RTI activist who has been working for the clinic for a year now. “Almost 90 percent queries are answered. Our Clinic will soon be completing two years. Also, we have also plans to conducts more such Clinics in the near future.”

What is RTI Clinic?
A coalition of civil society organizations holds RTI Clinic in the city on every last Saturday of the month to make people aware of the Act and its intricacies. In addition, they usher the right place, person and time to file your queries under the RTI Act, 2005. The coalition includes activists from human rights groups like South India Cell for Human Rights Education and Monitoring (SICHREM), Anti-Corruption group, a society has been working against corruption, and the like.

Activities:
Till date the coalition has come across more than 500 RTI-related problems approached by people from all walks of life. Reportedly, they have directed the right way in most of the cases. R Manohar, a coordinator of (SICHREM) who often takes part at the clinic along with people from other organizations, said, “Soon after our inception in May 2009, we have regularly been meeting so many people with their unanswered queries about the Act and our success has been seen in their right access to all the information they wanted.” Though the clinic was started off with suggesting people and answering their thousand of queries initially, after few months it also started discussing the success stories of different RTIs filed by people, he adds.

Apart from helping people file their RTI properly, they themselves file RTIs asking information on various human rights issues. Manohar said, “We have filed a RTI to the state government asking a detailed information about the convicts who are on death row across the state.” However, he adds, the state government failed to provide detailed information and they said they do not have any data recorded in this regard.