Enabling citizens to leverage the provisions of the RTI act of India: an ICT driven case study
Pages 341 - 346
Abstract
The NeGP (National e-Governance Plan) aims at integrating information network at the district, states and national level to a common e-information grid, which would help faster and transparent dissemination of information to the citizens -- Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, former President of India on 14th October, 2006.
The above statement by Dr. Kalam encourages fusion of e-Governance with Right to Information. The Constitution of India has declared that fundamental right to speech and expression and also the fundamental right to life and liberty should include the right of the citizen to access information. The land mark act has come into force from June 2005 which is known as "RTI Act 2005:.
To ensure equal opportunity to urban, semi-urban and rural mass and to have proper coverage of the information across India -- a vast country with diverse backgrounds, ICT based solutions becomes a major driver. It helps the government to serve the people better with quick response rates and ensuring the availability of sufficient resources with maximum reach which results in increased social and economic benefits.
Indian RTI Act 2005 envisage for a citizen to seek for information from any of the government department/organization(s)/NGOs termed as Public Authorities (PA), virtually on any issue by filing an RTI request to the concerned Public Information Officer (PIO). In case the information seeker does not get the information sought for within stipulated time frame of a month or is not satisfied with the information provided by the PIO can prefer an appeal before 1st Appellate Authority (AA) of the concerned department/organization and subsequently before the 2nd Appellate Authority i.e. Central Information Commission (CIC). Alternatively one can also file a complaint with the CIC in case RTI regime has not been put in place by the Department/Organization.
In order to facilitate those citizens who files appeal and complaints before the Commission; two simple user friendly online forms (The Citizen Module, http://rti.india.gov.in) have been designed in congruence with the RTI Act. Whereas on the other hand an internal workflow system has also been designed, developed and implemented within CIC (The Administrative Workflow Module), which ensures proper monitoring of the entire activities during disposal of a case since its filing.
References
[1]
Law Policy Practice by Rodney D Ryder; Publisher's Editorila Board, Edition 2006, Right to Information
[2]
RTI Web Site for the RTI Act, Accessed on 10 May 2009 at: http://www.rti.india.gov.in/rti_act.pdf
[3]
Informatics, Vol. 17 No. 3 January 2009, Accessed on 9 May 2009 at: http://informatics.nic.in
[4]
CIC Web Site, Accessed on 10 May 2009 at: http://cic.gov.in
[5]
Guidelines to Indian Government Web Site, Accessed on 10 May 2009 at: http://web.guidelines.gov.in
[6]
Gupta M P, Kumar P and Bhattacharya J, Government Online -- Opportunities and Challenges, Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company Ltd., New Delhi, India.
[7]
Digital Governance website, Accessed on 12 April 2009 at: http://www.digitalgovernance.org
[8]
Information Commissioner's Office website. Accessed on 1 August 2009 at: http://www.ico.gov.uk/tools_and_resources/decision_notices.aspx and Institute for Access to Public Information of Mexico City. Accessed at: www.infodf.org.mx
Index Terms
- Enabling citizens to leverage the provisions of the RTI act of India: an ICT driven case study
Recommendations
Citizen participation in the process of ICT enabled governance: a case study
ICEGOV '07: Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Theory and practice of electronic governanceThe most powerful weapon on the earth is public opinion [Paul Crouser]
Governance encompasses not just government, but also the civil society, the systems, the procedures and processes in place for planning, management and decision-making. Fostering ...
Digital transformation model: analytic approach on participatory governance & community engagement in India
dg.o '18: Proceedings of the 19th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research: Governance in the Data AgeGovernments around the globe are more and more aiming at digital and participatory governance to become more integrative and responsive for citizen-centric superior service delivery. Reconstruction of the technical and structural framework is also going ...
Web Accessibility Assessment of Government Web Solutions: a Case Study in Digital India
ICEGOV '17: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic GovernanceIt is one of the prime intent of Government of India (GoI) to ensuremajority of government services to be delivered electronically to the citizen through the medium of web and mobile. It is therefore, besides making government services online, Digital ...
Comments
Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.Information & Contributors
Information
Published In
Copyright © 2009 ACM.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 10 November 2009
Check for updates
Author Tags
Qualifiers
- Research-article
Conference
ICEGOV '09
ICEGOV '09: 3rd International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance
November 10 - 13, 2009
Bogota, Colombia
Acceptance Rates
Overall Acceptance Rate 350 of 865 submissions, 40%
Contributors
Other Metrics
Bibliometrics & Citations
Bibliometrics
Article Metrics
- 0Total Citations
- 140Total Downloads
- Downloads (Last 12 months)1
- Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
Reflects downloads up to 02 Mar 2025
Other Metrics
Citations
View Options
Login options
Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.
Sign in