Political parties use RTI to take on rivals

NEW DELHI: The Right to Information is no more an aid for the common man. It is fast becoming a potent political tool. Congress has made it its weapon of choice to take on the state governments in Odisha, UP and Punjab while BJP fought its land acquisition battle in Noida last year armed with information collected from RTI applications.

It isn’t the Opposition parties alone that politicians gun for. Congress MP from Gurgaon Rao Inderjit Singh had recently filed RTI applications to prove that Bhupinder Hooda-led Congress government in Haryana had been cornering development projects in Rohtak, Jhajjar and Sonepat – areas of influence of CM and son Deepender.

With elections just a year away, Congress in Odisha has started collecting information from the BJD government to use in its election campaign. What percentage of population lives below poverty line? How much money under Indira Awas Yojana has been utilized over the last 10 years? How many kilometers of roads have been built under Pradhan Mantri’s Grameen Sadak Yojana? These are not queries from a concerned citizen or questions posed by parliamentarians in Lok Sabha. These RTI applications Congress has shot off to different government departments in Odisha.

“We are trying to concentrate mainly on how Odisha government has not been able to use the funds Centre has been sending under various schemes. We are concentrating on the 20-point programme schemes which have been designed for poverty alleviation,” says Odisha Congress president Niranjan Patnaik.

Congress had made a beginning in Uttar Pradesh before the 2007 Assembly elections. Congress’ then state unit chief Rita Bahuguna Joshi had inundated the government with RTI applications to access records on fund utilization, development in Bundelkhand region and land acquisition. A similar strategy was employed in the 2012 elections by BJP which accessed land records to show how agricultural land was acquired from farmers and ‘gifted away’ for setting up luxury farmhouses in Noida.

Political leaders feel that there is unexpected information that could come your way through RTI applications. Wife of newly appointed Punjab Congress president and also a Congress MLA Charanjit Kaur Bajwa says: “I had been struggling to get drinking water projects sanctioned for rural areas of my constituency Qadian. I thought there were delays from the central ministry in Delhi. But when I filed RTI applications I found that the projects had been sanctioned but the state government had been sitting on the funds.” Bajwa is now planning yet another spate of RTI applications as she feels that the state government is diverting central funds to sanction projects only in areas of influence of Badals.