RTI for NRIs?
The following news appeared in some blogs thanks to senior
cistizen's activist Shri Sailesh Mishra.
But as an Indian i feel the following judgement by the honourable
Supremecourt of India is WRONG and has dangerous implications for the
future of our country especially security. A person of indian origin
is different from NRIs. Persons of Indian origin sign the following
oath to the country of their immigration as it feeds their belly. How
can an citizen of USA/UK/canada who sign the following oath can have
access to our Indian RTI act? Indians and legal luminaries must ponder
over this.
"I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely
renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince,
potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore
been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the
Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all
enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and
allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United
States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant
service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the
law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian
direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation
freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help
me God."
In some cases, USCIS allows the oath to be taken without the clauses:
". . .that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when
required by law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed
Forces of the United States when required by law. . ."
""""""In 2008 the Supreme Court granted all overseas Indians the
right to seek information from any public authority, organisation or
institution under the Right to Information (RTI) Act 2005, saying the
right is available to all persons of Indian origin (PIOs) who have
obtained the status of Pravasi Bharatiya.
The ruling was made by a bench comprising Justices S B Sinha and
Cyriac Joseph on an appeal petition by a non-resident Indian (NRI)
scientist based in the United States, Dr Kunal Saha, after he was
denied information by the West Bengal Medical Council about details of
the medical treatment given to his late wife, Dr Anuradha Saha, at a
Kolkata hospital.
Dr Anuradha Saha died in 1998, allegedly due to an incorrect
dose/treatment administered to her at the hospital. Dr Saha, a noted
AIDS vaccine researcher at Ohio State University, has been fighting to
prove a case of medical negligence since 1998.
Dr Saha approached the apex court against a Calcutta High Court order
rejecting his plea seeking documents under the Right to Information
(RTI) Act that the Medical Council was said to have obtained in the
course of their investigation into his complaint against senior
Kolkata doctors. The high court also held that Dr Saha was an NRI and
thereby not entitled to information under the newly enacted law.
The Supreme Court however upheld Dr Saha's appeal petition that he was
entitled to information under the RTI Act. Early last year, the
Supreme Court admitted a claim for Rs 1.43 billion compensation by the
US-based AIDS researcher against the Kolkata doctors -- the highest in
the country till date. The case is under consideration by the
country's top judiciary.
The apex court's order vis-à-vis the RTI Act has brought cheer to
India's NRI community for a number of reasons.
In June 2007, the Indian embassy in Washington DC brought all its
operations under the purview of the RTI Act as a result of the
persistent efforts of volunteers from the Association for India's
Development (AID), a non-profit group based in the United States. This
meant that the RTI Act extended to all Indian citizens living in the
US. The Supreme Court of India has now ensured that the RTI Act covers
all persons of Indian origin, anywhere in the world.
"Our repeated attempts since November 2006 to get Indian embassy
officials in Washington DC to implement the RTI Act went unheard, and
then we were left with no choice but to get in touch with the central
information commissioner directly," explains Arun Gopalan, a Maryland
resident and an AID member.
The Central Information Commission in New Delhi issued an order around
April 2007 bringing all missions abroad under the purview of the RTI
Act. It took one-and-a-half months of further campaigning by AID
volunteers to get the Indian embassy in Washington DC to accept its
first RTI petition.
Now, any Indian citizen with a valid Indian passport can file an RTI
application with the public information officer at the Indian embassy
after paying a fee of 24 cents, equivalent to Rs 10. The embassy then
transfers the application to the relevant department in India if the
information requested does not pertain to the embassy itself. The
applicant must receive a response within 35 days or he/she can file an
appeal with the appellate authority and later with the chief
information commissioner in India.
Close to 50 applications have so far been filed in what has been an
encouraging start to the RTI campaign in the US. India's RTI Act is
similar to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in the US that is
extensively used by the American public: 3-5 million FOIA applications
are filed every year.
"Filing an RTI application is easier than the leave-of-absence
applications you wrote in your primary school," says Somu Kumar, a
volunteer with the Anti-Corruption Team (ACT) of AID, living in
Virginia. Somu was one of the first NRIs to file an RTI application
from the US, requesting information that may help hold Dow Chemicals
accountable for the Bhopal tragedy and compel it to come clean on the
contamination of groundwater that continues at the plant site even today.
AID's anti-corruption team focuses on spreading awareness about the
RTI Act in the USA, and supports non-governmental organisations
working in India to fight corruption. AID has set up an
anti-corruption fund and hopes to raise $50,000 to help implementation
of the RTI Act and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA).
However, Washington is experiencing some teething problems: the
embassy announced on its website recently that NRIs could send their
applications to it "only when the subject matter can reasonably be
presumed to pertain to the embassy". This, despite an express
provision -- Section 6(3) of the RTI Act -- stating that if the
subject matter of an application addressed to one public authority
actually related to another, then the former has to transfer it to the
latter within five days.
The mission in Washington admitted under the RTI Act about a month ago
that in 31 of the 45 queries received till then, NRIs had been
"advised to send their applications directly" to the public
authorities based in India. The queries sought information on diverse
public interest issues such as the Narmada project, Nandigram, Dow
Chemicals and the Bhopal gas tragedy.
Disclaiming its statutory obligation to transfer such queries, the
embassy said it would not entertain applications where "the
information required obviously does not pertain to the embassy". When
asked to disclose the file notings, under the RTI Act, that had led to
the statement on the website, the embassy said: "The information
contained in the website was created by the public information officer
with the approval of the Government of India."
On an application filed by NRI Vishal Kudchadkar, the embassy also
declined to provide a list of cases in which applicants had been told
to send their applications directly to the public authorities in
India. It said disclosure of the list would violate the applicants'
"privacy".
NRIs believe the grounds cited by the embassy for withholding
information on applicants flies in the face of the transparency
maintained by the independent appellate body in New Delhi, the Central
Information Commission (CIC), which lists all its decisions on its
website along with the names and addresses of applicants.
Still, for many NRIs, the RTI Act has been a godsend. A survey
conducted by AID among sections of US-based NRIs in 2007 revealed that
81% of them had paid bribes at various stages in India. The NRIs said
they had bribed the authorities for international drivers' permits and
passports whilst leaving India. At the time of re-entering India, they
had to pay bribes to Customs; during their stay in India they paid
bribes to obtain land records.
A shocking feature of the survey was that 75% of NRIs had not heard of
the RTI Act. "They (the NRI respondents) were pleasantly surprised
when informed that the RTI Act has been successfully used by the
common people in India to get pensions, ration cards, etc, without
paying bribes," AID said.
Tushar Dalvi, an NRI settled in Santa Cruz a few years ago, used the
RTI Act to get an income tax refund that had been pending for five
years. Dalvi had a non-resident ordinary account from which the bank
had been deducting tax at source on the interest accumulated on his
deposits. Although he had filed his returns and applied for a refund
with the central international taxation department, from 2002 onwards,
he had not received a reply from the income tax department.
Dalvi decided to file an RTI query with the income tax department's
central public information officer (CPIO) in December last year asking
about the status of his refund. "The officer in charge forwarded my
request to the CPIO for international taxation. I got both my refunds
within a week. Later, I also got the interest and my assessment orders
from them, which they had missed initially with the original refund
cheques," he said.
Meanwhile, AID and other organisations continue to run awareness camps
and signature drives in support of the RTI Act in Washington DC,
Durham, Boston, Philadelphia, the Bay Area, Columbus, San Diego and
Chicago. They are also active in India.
The Indian government's website, http://india.gov.in, says: `Like
Indian nationals, NRIs and PIOs too have every right to know their
roles, rights, duties, responsibilities and privileges. Section 4 of
the RTI (Right to Information) Act, 2005 enables NRIs and PIOs to have
access to information imperative for them. The Ministry of Overseas
Indian Affairs defines RTI rights for NRIs and PIOs. As one of their
basic rights, NRIs and PIOs can contact the PGE (Protector General of
Emigrants) in case of any grievance or query. """""
