Former US President Woodrow Wilson had said, “Government ought to be all outside and no inside… Everybody knows that corruption thrives in secret places and avoids public places, and we believe it a fair presumption that secrecy means impropriety.”
The openness that Wilson had once envisioned in the early 1900s is being actively sought after even today. The concept of open data has been gaining momentum among local governments in recent years, but cities in India continue to cling onto their culture of opacity.
Open data is the process by which governments disclose information that is relevant to citizens into the public domain. This is crucial as it brings in transparency into governance, thereby making administration more accountable. Opening up do cuments and decisions also helps spread awareness about government processes among citizens, giving them a sense of ownership and participation.
India has taken some sincere steps towards openness by bringing in the RTI Act, 2005 and also by launching the open data portal www.data.gov.in by the National Informatics Centre. But such transparency has mostly been restricted to the national and state level, not seeping down to the working of local government bodies which determine the daily life of ordinary populace. The data portal for instance, discloses information from 69 departments, 63 belonging to the centre and 3 to state with no data from municipal governments.
An information gap isn’t the only hurdle towards building a healthy citizen-government tie. Community participation too is immensely lacking. While 16 large cities have passed the community participation law, no city except Hyderabad has actually taken the trouble of constituting area sabhas to involve citizens in policy making at the neighbourhood level. Pune is the only city where the people are involved in the budgeting process. This despite laws mandating public disclosures.
This opacity is dismal at a time when cities around the globe are investing all efforts in open government practices. Participatory budgeting at the municipal level was started as early as 1989 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Similar steps have been taken in Chicago, Montreal and New York to name a few.
Whether India will follow this global trail of openness only time will tell.
Jaya
MBA-IT
IIIT Allahabad