Auditing the Right to Information Act

The department of personnel and training (DoPT) proposes to ask the international firm PricewaterhouseCoopers to assess the efficacy of the Right to Information (RTI) Act of 2005. The RTI Act has been hard won with activists raising awareness about the issue since the 1990s. They have now criticised the government for hiring a foreign company for the evaluation and are certain that the exercise is meant to ease the discomfort that the law has generated for a secrecy-loving bureaucracy. (Editorial) May 3-9, 2008