Govt to educate school children about RTI

Govt to educate school children about RTI

http://www.hindustantimes.com/India-news/NewDelhi/Govt-to-educate-school-children-about-RTI/Article1-915777.aspx


Govt to educate school children about RTI
Chetan Chauhan, Hindustan Times
New Delhi, August 18, 2012

First Published: 18:57 IST(18/8/2012)
Last Updated: 19:00 IST(18/8/2012)

The day the Central government notified the new rules diluting the
Right To Information Act, the HRD ministry decided to tell school
children across India that the transparency law was an effective tool
to fight corruption and demand good governance.
The National Council of Education Research and Training (NCERT) has
decided to print a RTI message in the textbooks of class VI to VIII
saying the law empowers the "citizens and promotes transparency and
accountability" in the working of the government and "contains"
corruption.

The message to be displayed on the inside page of the back cover of
the textbooks is expected to reach aproximately to one crore students
in 2012, a year before next general elections.

The message says-- the RTI Act can help in making our democracy work
for people in real sense. And, a testimony to it is that about 10
crore RTI applications had been filed with different public
authorities across India till 2010, said a study done by Center for
Media Studies.

Not just creating awareness, the HRD ministry asked the children to
seek information from the government using the tool.

"You can seek necessary information about various activities of the
government through an RTI application," the message reads, while
detailing the process to seek the information.

Much before the government decided to create awareness, many school
children across India have used the RTI Act to get access to their
answer sheets and even seek information about the facilities available
to them.

Aishwarya Parashar, a class-VI student of the City Montessori School,
Lucknow, had stumped the nation when it was discovered through her RTI
that the government has not notified Mahatma Gandhi as father of the
nation.

The message tells the students that an RTI application can be filed on
a plain paper even though several government ministries have
prescribed a format for using RTI.

It also says that the RTI application can be send through a post office.

It was the Central Information Commission in 2011 which had asked the
HRD ministry to display a message creating awareness about the
transparency law and last week the ministry communicated the NCERT's
decision the information watchdog, the day it received the rules
diluting the RTI law from department of personnel and training.

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