The Right To Information Act & Its Discontents
By Muttukrishna Sarvananthan –June 20, 2016
Dr. Muttukrishna Sarvananthan
The Right to Information (RTI) Act currently being debated in the Parliament and scheduled to be taken up for voting on June 23, 2016 is long overdue. It has been in the making for the past fifteen years. It is heartening to note that the remit of the Act is broad in so far as to include the Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) as well, in addition to all layers of the government: national, provincial, and local.
Genesis of the Right to Information (RTI) Act
The Asian financial crisis of the late-1990s led to the enactment of the Right to Information law and Fiscal Responsibility law in many Asian emerging market economies in order to tame (what Adam Smith called) the “animal spirits” of the newly industrialising countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, et al. The Right to Information (RTI) or the Freedom of Information (FOI) laws are natural outgrowth of the Consumer Protection/Rights laws in many countries throughout the world.
There is significant evidence to show that the Asian financial crisis during the late-1990s was to a considerable extent caused by the lack of information on the financial markets in particular in most countries affected by the economic crisis.
In Sri Lanka too the second wave of major economic liberalisation undertaken since 1990, especially the partial privatisation of state-owned enterprises such as the Sri Lanka Telecom, Sri Lankan Airlines and the Ceylon Gas Company during the second half of the 1990s, led to allegations of under-valuation of assets owned by the sate-owned enterprises and massive corruption in the process of such privatisation. Moreover, for the first time since independence, the Sri Lankan economy experienced negative growth in 2001 (-1.5%), primarily due to fiscal profligacyof the then government (partly necessitated by the heightened civil war since the fall of the Elephant Pass in April 2000).
As a result of alleged massive corruption and negative economic growth, during the campaign for the parliamentary elections in late-2001, the proposals for Fiscal Responsibility law and the Right to Information law was mooted by the then opposition party (UNP) which was elected to office in December 2001. The same party is in power today as well. The UNP government enacted the Fiscal (Management) Responsibility Act (F(M)RA) in 2003. The very first draft of the RTI law was drafted by the government in 2003, but that government lost power at the April 2004 elections before the RTI bill could be presented to Parliament.
Two fundamental flaws in the proposed RTI Act
- Lack of penalties for non-compliance
Like most laws with good intentions in Sri Lanka, the F(M)RA has not been fully implemented to date. For example, the F(M)RA stipulated that the government should reduce the budget deficit to 5% of the GDPby 2006, which has not been achieved by the previous UPFA governments(2004 -2014) as well as the present UNF government to date. Moreover, there is no indication or commitment by the present government that the set target will be achieved in the foreseeable future.
