India's Right to Information Comes to the US

Acting on a petition from overseas Indians, Chief Information Commissioner Wajahat Habibullah issued a directive in April that brings all Indian foreign missions under the act. The Indian Embassy in Washington D.C. is the first to establish a protocol for handling these requests, appointing Rahul Chhabra, counselor for Press, Information and Culture at the embassy, as public information officer.
Under the RTI Act, overseas Indians who hold an Indian passport may request government information by submitting a written or electronic request with a fee of Rs 10 (25 cents). Officials are required to respond to public information requests within 35 days.

According to local activists, the embassy long resisted efforts to gain access through the RTI act. Says Arun Gopalan, a resident of Maryland: “Our repeated attempts since November 2006 to get the Indian embassy officials in Washington D.C. to implement the RTI Act went unheard and then we were left with no other option but to get in touch with the Central Information Commission directly.”

Presently the Indian Embassy is only accepting RTI applications for information relating to the embassy. However overseas Indians have launched an online petition to require the embassy to transfer applications regarding information from other agencies, which is also provided in the act. However, the embassy asserts that the provision “for the transfer of an application by a receiving PIO to another [concerned] PIO, this is clearly meant to cover situations where the application is addressed to a PIO on the assumption that it has been directed to the concerned PIO.”

The Association for India’s Development insists this interpretation violates the RTI Act, which, they say in a petition to India’s U.S. Ambassador Ronen Sen, “states without any ambiguity that if an application for information is received that pertains to another public authority, then within 5 days, the Public Information Officer (at the embassy) should transfer the application to the relevant public authority.”

The hrefusal of the embassy to transfer such requests, the organization claims, would hobble the ability of overseas Indians to take advantage of the RTI Act.