Very little info available on subsidies,rues Ansari

Vice-President M Hamid Ansari on Tuesday voiced his dissatisfaction on the way the countrys revolutionary Right to Information law has turned out over the four years since its inception. He said the very signs that RTI has reached the common man is bleak,considering the fact that he cannot read the language in which the law is written in. I have noticed that information on the RTI Act,including the translation of the Act itself,is not available in all the 22 languages mentioned in the Eighth Schedule of our Constitution. The website of the Ministry of Personnel,Public Grievances and Pensions has the RTI Act in only 11 languages, the Vice-President said at the fourth annual convention of the Central Information Commission.

He said very little information was available on the governments subsidy programmes worth Rs 2,00,000 crore. It is important to note that Section 4 of the Act mandates every public authority publish the manner of execution of subsidy programmes,including the amounts allocated and details of beneficiaries… While such a process has been initiated with respect to NREGA,significant work remains to be done on this issue.