After persistent efforts from volunteers of the Association for India's Development (AID), the Embassy of India in Washington DC has implemented the Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005, bringing its operations fully under the Act's purview. The RTI Act is being extensively used in India to obtain information from Government offices, and this recent action extends the implementation of the Act to all Indian citizens living in the US as well.
 
"Filing an RTI application is easier than the leave of absence applications you wrote in your primary school" says Somu Kumar, a volunteer of the Anti Corruption Team (ACT) of AID, living in Virginia. Somu is one of the first Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) to have filed an RTI application from the  U.S. and has requested information that may help hold Dow Chemicals, headquartered in the USA, accountable for Bhopal tragedy and to clean up the Bhopal plant that continues to contaminate ground water.
 
Any Indian citizen with a valid Indian passport can now file an RTI application to the Public Information Officer at the Indian Embassy paying a fee of 24 cents. The Embassy will automatically transfer the application to the relevant department in India if the information requested does not pertain to the Embassy itself. The applicant should get a response within 35 days or he/she can file an appeal to Appellate Authority and later to the Chief Information Commissioner. More details pertaining to filing can be found at http://rti.aidindia.org/
 
"Our repeated attempts since November 2006 to get the Indian Embassy officials in Washington DC to implement the RTI Act went unheard, and then we were left with no other choice but to get in touch with the Central Information Commissioner directly," explains Arun Gopalan, a Maryland resident and an AID-ACT member.  The Central Information Commission issued an order around April 2007 bringing all the missions abroad under the purview of the RTI act. It took one and a half more months of campaigning by AID volunteers to get Indian Embassy in Washington D.C. to accept its first RTI petition.  
 
Close to 10 applications have been filed so far in what has been an encouraging start to the RTI campaign in the U.S . ACT will continue its efforts to spread awareness about Right to Information and urges all citizens to participate actively.  India's RTI is similar to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in the U.S . that is so extensively used by the American public that 3-5 million FOIA applications are filed every year.
 
AID's Anti-Corruption Team focuses on spreading awareness about the RTI Act in the USA, and supports non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in India to fight corruption. AID has set up an Anti-Corruption Fund and hopes to raise $50,000 to help with implementation of RTI and National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), another progressive Indian act that is not achieving its potential due to rampant corruption.  The NREGA guarantees 100 days of day-wage employment to all rural Indian families with an annual budget of 3 billion dollars. Currently AID supports anti-corruption work in New Delhi, Gujarat, UP, AP, Orissa, Jharkhand and Rajasthan.
 
"The volunteers of the anti-corruption team are committed to helping out the NRIs with applications. We really hope all the NRIs help us in weeding out corruption entirely from the system by using RTI extensively and supporting AID's Anti-corruption efforts" says Vinodth Mohanam, a Portland resident and a member of AID-ACT.
 
The RTI Act 2005 is widely considered as one of the most progressive laws ever passed in independent India. It empowers Indian citizens to question government decisions, and makes it mandatory for the government to disclose all information pertaining to those decisions. RTI when implemented properly is strongly believed to be an effective tool for controlling rampant corruption in government departments.
 
Association for India's Development (AID) is a US-based non-profit organization, which supports grassroots groups working towards sustainable, just, equitable and holistic development in India.

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