On the Indian Right To Information Act

Right to information is a law today in over 85 countries across the World. The one in India is said to be one of the World's best for many reasons and has been hailed as a landmark in India's drive towards greater accountability. For one it was drafted by civil society and Arvind Kejriwal and Aruna Roy were instrumental in activating it. The law has taken inspiration from previous legislation from a few states (Tamil Nadu, Goa, Rajasthan , Karnataka, Delhi, Maharashtra, Assam and Jammu & Kashmir) that allowed the right to information to different extents to citizens about activities of various state government bodies.The premise for the right to information is based on the fundamental right to freedom of speech and expression. It is only if you have the access to information can you exercise your right to freedom of speech and expression. However, the implementation of the law has had its own fair share of problems.

The Right To Information Act is a law that was enacted by the Parliament of India and allows public access to information. The law came into force in October 2005 and applies to all states and union territories in India, other than for Jammu & Kashmir (as per the Indian constitution, laws passed by Parliament are not automatically applicable to the state of Jammu & Kashmir unless endorsed by the state's legislature).

The act not only applies to all constitutional authorities (including the executive, legislature and judiciary) but also applies to all entities established by an act of Parliament or a state legislature, to entities that are owned, controlled or substantially financed by government (including NGOs) and even to information in private institutions that can be accessed by a public authority under any other law in force. Under this Act, all authorities covered need to appoint a Public Information Officer (PIO). The public may submit a request to this PIO in writing along with a nominal fee (those under the BPL need not pay this at all). From thereon it becomes the PIO's obligation to provide the information. If the request pertains to another public authority, it becomes the PIO's responsibility to transfer the concerned portions of the request to a PIO of the other within 5 days. In addition, Assistant Public Information Officers (APIOs) need to be designated by public authorities to receive RTI requests and appeals for forwarding to the PIOs of their public authority. There is a time limit of 30 days for replying to the request. However, if life or liberty of any person is involved, a reply within 48 hours from the PIO is mandated. Refusal with or without reasons (no reply is deemed as a refusal) may be ground for appeal or complaint and appropriate appellate authorities are to be nominated by the government wherein the appeal or complaint can be forwarded to.

This act is not restricted to seeking of information alone but also allows the public to inspect government work and seek photocopies of documents and samples of work. The limits to inspection per se are not defined and therefore this can be interpreted rather broadly by the public.

The RTI has been effective in dealing with bribery and especially if any legitimate work was pending in any government department and government officials were not doing it, either because they expected a bribe or simple because of bureaucratic lethargy. To counter this all the common man now has to do is ask the following: give me the names of the officials who were responsible for doing my work and who have not done it, why has my work not been done so far, when will my work be done now. Consequently, it becomes difficult for government departments to reply to one's queries as they now become more accountable and therefore they sometimes end up completing the work before even responding to the RTI.

However, there has been a problem with the lack of speedy appeal to non-compliance to requests. The appellate process, notably the information commissioners, barring a few exceptions, is perceived to be functioning against citizens rather than protecting their interests. Also, the lack of a central PIO makes it difficult to pin-point the correct PIO to approach for requests and therefore the request keeps getting pushed around. Also sometimes bureaucrats working in close proximity with the government are appointed in the RTI Commissions in a non-transparent manner and the PIO, being an officer of the relevant Government institution, may have a vested interest in not disclosing damaging information on activities of her/his institution creating a conflict of interest. In the state of Maharashtra, it was estimated that only 30% of the requests are actually realized under the Maharashtra Right to Information act and therefore the compliance still needs a lot of strengthening before it can before more effective as a law.

What's Wrong With the Indian Education System?

For lack of a better title, I decided to publish this post under the heading of "Whats Wrong With the Indian Education System". I am definitely no authority in this space and all I wanted to do is pen some thoughts on what I felt was wrong with our education system.

Statistics in this space are also readily available and while most people believe that the state of affairs is dismal, it actual isn't all that bad. In fact we have made considerable progress and the improved education system is often cited as a reason for India's economic progress. Also the private education market that was estimated to be worth $40 billion in 2008 will increase to $68 billion by 2012. 

However it is for sure that we need to do a lot still. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), India has the lowest public expenditure on higher education per student in the world. Barely 15% of all students reach high school, about 40% of the population is still illiterate, a huge number of teaching positions are vacant, over 50% of college faculty lack a Master's degree or PhD and post-secondary high schools have a capacity of under 10% of India's college-age population. Even if education is available, the quality of education is questionable. This brings us to a very important point: how do we measure the quality of education and more importantly how do we define education?

Wikipedia defines what education is best. Education or teaching in the broadest sense is any act or experience that has a formative effect on the mind, character or physical ability of an individual. How does one transmit this experience? In a formal system, this would be via instruction, teaching and learning. So therefore we have 3 primary stake holders here: the students, teachers, and the schools themselves. Student learning is easy to measure, isn't it? Or is it? Let’s take schools first. The answer here always has been tests! Or better still standardized tests. Of course given that we have the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) as the apex body for curriculum related matters for school education in India, this can't be that hard now, can it. Well let’s see, we have students from state government boards, CBSE, ICSE, IB schools, Madrassas and some autonomous institutions. So a standardized test is actually harder than it looks. Besides, anyone can pass any test by being just ‘testwise’. For college education, a measure of a good student should be if she/he is employed with a job of their choice and not just salary. So we he have employee satisfaction surveys but it’s often difficult to link this back to the quality of learning that a student would have imbibed. 

Measure the quality of teaching is even more difficult. We in fact don't measure the quality of teaching really and actually assess a particular teacher's competency only. A teacher's competency is here measured mostly on their merit more than anything else. There are several unsung teachers across the countries and elsewhere who have made greater impacts to student lives than those armed with PhDs and the likes. 

Measuring the quality of the institution is probably the easiest among the three. Student scores, research work being conducted, employability of alumni, brand of institution are all rather direct ways to measure it. Of course, it is rather strange then that the same institute is ranked differently when it comes to independent surveys. The claim here is that the methodology differs from survey to survey and therefore the rankings will accordingly be impacted.  

Sir Ken Robinson has a very interesting take on schools. He in his Ted talk (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY) claims that schools are actually killing creativity today. I couldn't agree with him anymore. My company completed recruiting from these 4 institutions this year: Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, Indian Institute of Management (A), Indian Institute of Management (B) and Indian Institute of Technology (Delhi). These are among the best in their domain in India. I will for now talk about our IIT (Delhi) experience. We were interviewing for interns and we were pretty late into the process anyway. And therefore most of the good talent had been picked up anyway. Therefore we were very surprised to be able to interview this chap who had made to rank 15 nationwide of the entrance examination to the IIT. His grades had taken a hit and his grade point average was far below normal. When we interviewed him we found out the reason his grades had suffered was that he had an accentuated speech and hearing problem. As a consequence of which he couldn't pick up in class and lagged behind on his grades and subsequently companies didn't shortlist him because of his poor grades. This pained me like nothing else. For one, this was a brilliant chap in one of India's best institutions and the system had completely done him in. If we use tests and grades as a yard stick for measuring everything, then there will no creativity left.

What's wrong with our system? Well, plenty as I have laid out here. But what worried me most is in the quality of education we provide to the students of our country. If we punish a first grade kid for crayon coloring his bull purple in color, then all the literacy statistics we have won't mean for a thing.