“We, the citizens of India, are the masters of this country”

“We, the citizens of India, are the masters of this country. The government exists to serve us.” So introduces itself the web-site for Parivartan, a Delhi based “citizen’s movement.” Their mission: “reinforcement of democratic values.” [1] Arvind Kejriwal, the head of the Parivartan movement, was recently announced one of this year’s Ramon Magsaysay award winners.

Parivartan started in 2000 as a movement to help people with grievances against corrupt tax officials. It called upon citizens to not pay bribes to the Income Tax Department and to instead to approach Parivartan with their problems. They have been able to get 700 such cases resolved till now. A successful Public Interest Litigation was filed in the Delhi High Court to get changes introduced in the system to end the harassment of the common man.

Starting in 2002, Parivartan started helping people with similar grievances against the Delhi Vidyut Board. Its members would sit outside the DVB offices daily and call upon people entering not to pay bribes to the officials and instead to approach Parivartan for help. With DVB, they have helped more than 2500 people.

With the adoption of the Right to Information Act (RTI) in 2001 in Delhi, they started using the rights bestowed upon the citizens to get issues with corrupt and inefficient officials resolved. By educating people on the powers that this act gives to them, they helped people in taking up their own cases for themselves. Since the adoption of the act by the parliament in June 2005, Parivartan has focused solely on using RTI to “ensure transparency and accountability in governance.” (Parivartan)

In awarding Arvind Kejriwal this year’s award for “Emergent Leadership”, the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, “recognized his activating India’s right-to-information movement at the grassroots, empowering New Delhi’s poorest citizens to fight corruption by holding government answerable to the people.” His work brings hope to every honest and hard-working Indian, and should inspire anyone who has ever complained about India’s corrupt bureaucracy to act. This is a well-deserved achievement.

 

Right To Information

Under the Right to Information Act, public authorities are required to maintain all of their records in a manner that facilitates access to them, and make them available upon request. [2] Anyone can now, for example, approach the local Municipal Corporation and demand access to records of the budget allocated to each of its projects. People can request updates on their applications for water or electricity connections, passports, etc. This will make the functioning of public authorities much more transparent and accountable to the people.

Each public authority is required to designate Public Information Officers whose job it is to receive applications for information or for receiving appeals and grievances. A written request can be made to them for a nominal fee without having to provide any reasons for the request. The authority then has a maximum of 30 days to either grant the request or to reject it based on any qualified reasons. If the relevant information is not provided or is delayed beyond the set period, the requestor can file a complaint either with the Public Information Officer, or if that is not accepted, with a specially setup Commission. The acceptance of an appeal levies a fine of Rs. 250 per day on the authority in question until the requested information has been furnished fully.

The kind of information that is exempted from disclosure includes information, disclosure of which might harm security or strategic interests of the country, trade secrets or intellectual property, and information protected through court rulings, among others. (RTI)

 

Restrictions on access to File Notings

Recently there has been a move by the government to pass an amendment restricting access to “file notings” for anything but developmental and social issues. File notings are the documentation of the reasoning behind decisions. [3] The decision making process of government offices and authorities is detailed in these. Why a certain officer was selected for a post, for example, or why a transfer was made is documented in file notings. Revocation of this access will severely limit the effectiveness of the original Act. Aruna Roy, a past Magsaysay award recipient, says, “The RTI Act was the outcome of a democratic process that involved grass-roots activists, ordinary citizens, eminent jurists, and even progressive civil servants and politicians. It can’t be subverted from the top. We can’t allow that. We will fight these amendments every inch of the way.” [4] Activists have been very vocal about their opposition to this amendment and protests against it have delayed the passing of it.

 

[1] Parivartan, www.parivartan.com

[2] Right to Information Act, http://persmin.nic.in/RTI/WelcomeRTI.htm

[3] “Save RTI Campaign” on Aid India’s website: http://rti.aidindia.org/content/view/21/54/

[4] “RTI is our last chance to cleanse the system”, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1893771.cms

Internet Censorship in China

Human Rights watch released a report yesterday on Internet censoring in China, titled “Race to the Bottom – Corporate Complicity in Chinese Internet Censorship” [1]. It reports that China’s system of internet keyword and URL censoring is highly developed and sophisticated. Such a system, “would not be possible without extensive private and corporate sector cooperation, including by some of the world’s major Internet companies” [2]. The international Internet companies discussed in the report include Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google and Skype.

The report details the kind and amount of censorship on the internet in China through extensive web searches of politically sensitive material. The term “Dongzhou” [3], a village where last year the Chinese police opened fire on local protestors and killed several, returns nothing related to the incident on the first few pages of the search results on Yahoo’s Chinese engine (http://cn.yahoo.com), whereas the international engine (http://www.yahoo.com/) returns tons of relevant material. The report also documents the cases of four vocal critics of the Chinese government who have been prosecuted for dissidence after Yahoo provided the government authorities with user information. This prosecution is a violation of the basic civil human right to free expression and Yahoo’s cooperation has been a contributor.

Google, under Chinese government pressure (who banned google.com at one point), released Google.cn which censors content returned in web search results. Microsoft blocks political terms from the titles of blogs published in their MSN spaces. HRW urges these companies to not let themselves be “used by governments as tools of political manipulation and in some cases abuse of fundamental human rights” (Richardson).

The Internet companies say that while they stand by people’s right to free expression, they also are obliged to follow local rules and regulations no matter which country they do business in. They also claim that providing Internet services in China with some content censored, is still benefitting people more than if they were not present there at all [4]. HRW believes that there has been, over all, very little effort on the part of these companies to resist demands for censorship. They want the Internet companies to comply only if demands for censorship are made through valid legally binding procedures that can be documented, and when all other avenues to resist it have been exhausted.

HRW claims that the issue is of active compliance. These companies, by actively censoring content which is sensitive in China, are acting unethically. By active censoring they mean cases where when one searches for a term and doesn’t get back any links to the web-sites (whether the sites are banned or not), or there is inadequate documentation that some censorship has happened. Google created their own censoring mechanisms based on their own testing of what the Chinese ISP’s were blocking [5]. The report intends to warn against possible complicity in cases where human rights violations can occur. It suggests that these companies can function in China while still doing so ethically. It suggests a number of things the companies can do, including among others [6], 

• o Not censoring content unless required by written, legally binding regulations.
• o Providing relevant information to the users whenever content is censored.
• o Developing and following an industry standard code of conduct restricting participation in activities violating the right to free expression

[1] “Race to the Bottom – Corporate Complicity in Chinese Internet Censorship”, http://www.hrw.org/reports/2006/china0806/

[2] Sophie Richardson, Deputy Director of Asia Division, Human Rights Watch, in an audio commentary posted on the Human Rights Watch website (http://www.hrw.org/).

[3] For more information on Dongzhou, see, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dongzhou_protests_of_2005.

[4] Danny Sullivan, “Google Created EvilRank Scale To Decide On Chinese Censorship,” Search Engine Watch, January 30, 2006 [online], http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/060130-154414.

[5] “Race to the Bottom”, Section IV. (3) Active censorship with Google.cn.

[6] “Race to the Bottom”, Section VI. Recommendations.