Years of data has gone missing from the central government portal, which provides citizens with access to information about the functioning of the government under the Right to Information Act. Along with this, many anomalies have started appearing in the user accounts present on this portal.
RTI: मोदी सरकार के आरटीआई पोर्टल से बरसों के कामकाज का डेटा गायब
Records of hundreds of applications have gone missing from the Modi government’s RTI online portal. It was used by citizens to file applications seeking information on various issues from the government. This has been confirmed by many RTI activists.
The Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) manages this portal and trains and disseminates standards on how government officials should respond to RTI applications and how to maintain it.
Kanhaiya Kumar, an RTI activist from Bihar, has confirmed that hundreds of errors have appeared in his account on the portal from January 2021 to August 2023. Similarly, the account of journalist of National Herald is not available anymore, nor is the option of ‘forgot password’ available for this account.
Citizens can file application on RTI online portal by paying only Rs.10 through digital medium. This facility was much better than other traditional means, which had to accompany the application with either a postal order or a check, which required a post office stamp. This portal is maintained by National Informatics Center (NIC).
According to a report published in The Hindu newspaper, the RTI online portal has processed over 58.3 lakh applications by 2022 since its launch in 2013. The number of applications filed on this portal is increasing continuously. In 2022, more than 12.6 lakh applications have been filed. The Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT), which manages the portal, did not respond to queries by The Hindu about the missing data.
Through this portal, citizens can access information from all central government ministries, departments, related institutions, regulators, Indian missions abroad and some union territories. For this, citizens have to create an account on this portal and then after paying Rs 10 per application, the application has to be sent either by post or submitted online.
Last year, the central government had abolished the facility of creating new accounts on this portal. DoPT attributed this to excessive load on the website. But those who already had accounts were given the facility that they must file at least one application every six months, only then their account would remain active.
Applying on the portal was also convenient because the personal information of the applicant was already available on the portal and they did not have to be filled every time. But now applicants have to fill personal information at the time of every application.
Digital rights activist Srinivas Kodali wrote on social media platforms that he has filed hundreds of RTI applications as part of his work documenting digitization in India. He wrote that “I have received thousands of pages, CDs, DVDs. NIC has now removed all RTI requests from http://rtionline.gov.in. It is almost like erasing the archival history of governance in this country.
He has further written that the removal of government orders is a serious issue. He said, “No official information was given to the users of the portal about this.”
The Right to Information Act, 2005, was a landmark law in India that gave a citizen the right to seek public information from governments, and increased transparency. However, since 2014, the system of obtaining information through applications or appeals has started to suffer due to the reluctance of government institutions and often years of non-appointment of information commissioners.
According to statistics, about 60 lakh applications are filed under the RTI Act every year, making it the most widely used transparency law in the world. RTI activists Anjali Bhardwaj and Amrita Johri have written that national assessments have shown that a large proportion of these are filed by the poorest sections of society. By giving every citizen of India the right to access government files and records, the law potentially made 130 crore people the watchdogs and auditors of the government.
In 2019, several counterintuitive amendments were made to the RTI Act, which did away with the fixed tenure and high degree of statutory protection given to commissioners. Despite strong opposition inside and outside Parliament, the government went ahead with the RTI (Amendment) Act which allows the central government to set the tenure and salary of all information commissioners.
Since May 2014, not a single commissioner of the Central Information Commission (CIC) has been appointed, requiring citizens to approach the courts. Presently Yashvardhan Kumar Sinha is the Chief Information Commissioner. The Central Information Commission is the highest appellate body under the Right to Information Act.
Experts say that in the recently concluded last session of Parliament, the digital personal data protector
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