Now that Team Anna has given up their Lokpal fight and instead nourishing an agenda to enter the Parliament as Politicians is one of the Worst Moves in our view. The Scam Scarred Government and Team Anna differed mainly on two views bringing CBI, PMO etc under the Lokpal. In our view, Team Anna threw away an opportunity to punish the corrupt and scamsters within the Government because of their arrogance in accepting a somewhat diluted version of Lokpal.
We’d like to draw parallels between Virtual Lokpal and how the RTI Act of 2005 is being used to bring transparency in administration, post, the Telecom Spectrum Scam. We’re witnessing the breakdown of an important government/corporate nexus. Earlier you went to politicians and bureaucrats to get something done. Post 2G there is a culture of fear amongst bureaucrats. There are no advocates of clearances, with no self-interest in being an advocate, and powerful reasons not to – tribal, environmental etc. If you re-negotiate any contract the fear is you will be accused of corruption.
RTI is a good and well intentioned piece of legislation, but its use is being distorted and vast amounts of time being consumed. Sometimes it is internal to government – i.e. dispute about promotion or pay, or business rivals using RTI when they lose a contract, launching RTI war. RTI requests are consuming so much time now that many ministries have someone at joint secretary level dedicated to RTI issues.
The Indian government wasn’t transparent, it needed transparency, but there also needs to be balance. But unfortunately in this charged atmosphere if you try amending the RTI act it means a new battle so it won’t happen.
How Diluted Lokpal and RTI could have checked Corruption ?
Team Anna did the worst thing by attacking the King and the Queen. In reality, they should always go bottom up in cleaning the system using RTI to uncover frauds and Lokpal to bring the guilty to books.
Nonetheless, Anna managed to scare the Karnataka Government and get Citizens Services Act Passed for rendering essential services to common man in a time bound manner.