Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hey, I’m Sandeep Parekh
and I’m gonna speak about the right to public information, devious data, as I call it.
It’s command to produce the information.
And it’s a right which is a very, very recent right in most parts of the world
around the year 2000.
Around 85 countries now have a right to public information.
Reaches... citizen’s right asking the government to produce information.
Information is key in the bureaucratic and governmental circles
because the monopoly of bureaucracy and governments,
two information produces an enormous amount of power
which can be misused, which can be a source of inefficiency.
A former judge of the U.S. Supreme Court
once said sunlight is the best of disinfectants and a lamppost the best of policemen.
Ours is a kind of a bit of a tweak on that.
We want the lamppost to actually put light on the policeman himself
so that his actions can be exposed then we can get the benefits of such exposure.
But clearly the devil is in the details. We’ve had countries like Zimbabwe and Mugabe.
We’ve had countries like Pakistan the dictator Musharraf
who implemented acts like these.
So the optics of having such an act are very clear
but there are lots of exemptions which most...
many of these countries actually implement would defeating.
So the exemption would actually be good
on that defeating the whole purpose of the act itself
so they can be exemptions on grounds of national security,
on grounds of public policy, whatever that means.
And, clearly, governments will try to defeat the purpose of having an act
despite there being an act.
A classic example is Mozambique... used.
I think we’ll talk about that, but it was used to counter electoral fraud.
A citizen kind of tried to find out whether electoral boxes, ballot boxes
are to find out there are malpractices that are actually happening.
This is kind of a personal study of mine. I worked at the security....
regulated for two years and I’ve tried to make board meetings public.
For two years I failed even at the senior position.
I came out as a citizen and I filed a short application, two lines,
five cents fee asking me for this information
and within two days the information was made public on the website.
The right has been used for many things
including cleaning roads in India, for instance.
India has been a great success story for kind of countering corruption.
If your passport is held up, file a right to information act,
you’ll probably get it very, very quickly.
It’s been used in... very, very crucially
where attendance level of public detail was in the region of 15 percent.
Somebody file the right to public information
asking for the attendance register of details, it suddenly...
70 percent from 15 percent and that’s kind of the power of the act which...
and I think that’s the best possible example.
Going forward what does our taskforce stand to do?
They plan to do two or three different things.
One is we’ve already kind of created the false draft of a model act which should be....
the hope will be the gold standard of an act
which countries can benchmark their loss against...
or if they don’t have a lot, they can bring in laws.
We plan to have a... which will be...
which will speak to ordinary citizens as opposed to technical legal 3:35.
People’s child and tribulations about their experiences in their country
about what is effective, what is not effective,
what are the exemptions of each ought to be kind of done away with
Do you want advocacy? Clearly, we need to kind of speak to people
both from the political... at the political and at the citizens level.
We will try to harness the efforts of various taskforces of global leaders
and the councils here. Outside we...
We plan to speak to the citizens through tweeter,
say, Facebook, social networking sites, the World Economic Forum, et cetera.
And clearly, the young global leader taskforce we already have 18 people
and I hope some more of you will join us. And the way forward is Europe clearly.
We want... the way we think this is an initiative
which makes all of the initiatives function so it’s...
I think it’s a very, very clean issue too.
We want to push towards more voluntary disclosure by governments.
We want kind of... Finally, at some point of time,
we also want country rankings of superior right to public information.
So with that, thank you so much.