Protection not Prosecution for Whistleblowers'

The Right to Information Act is one of the most revolutionary laws that have empowered the Indian People like no other law in this century. The law secures citizens’ right to access information under control of public authority in any form in order to promote transparency and accountability in the system. But when the informed citizenry exercised their right to information to expose misuse of government funds or to expose corruption or abuse of power in decision-making they were thrashed and sometimes their voices were made silent forever.

“Eight RTI activists killed in seven months” when recently made headline on the first page of a national daily The Hindu it explicitly stated the fate of the citizens who dared to use the act and exposed rampant corruption. Thus, in the aftermath of the Coldblooded murder of RTI activist Amit Jethwa who exposed illegal mining activities in a wild life-sanctuary in Gujarat the Cabinet has approved a bill Called The Public Interest Disclosure and Protection of Persons making the disclosure Bill,2010 or simply called Whistle Blowers’ Bill.

The Bill provides Central Vigilance Commission powers of a civil court to hand down harsh penalty revealing the identity of the whistle blowers’ and protecting them against victimisation or any disciplinary action against them. And revealing the identity of a Whistleblower can lead to three years of imprisonment or a fine up to fifty thousand rupees or both. Though the proposed Bill comes after six years, the Supreme Court pressed the government into issuing an office order, the Public Interest Disclosures and Protection of Informers Resolution, 2004 designating CVC as the nodal agency to handle complaints.

But one of the biggest drawbacks of the proposed bill is protection only for Central, State and public government employees and not to individuals and private or non-government organisations. Though there is no denial of the fact that government employees need protection from their own organisations after they expose corruption or abuse of power in public interest and we have had incidents of unfortunate deaths of Satyendra Dubey and Shanmughan Manjunath (two government officials )after they did something similar. Though as per the recommendations of the Second Administrative Reforms Commission, the scope of the proposed law could be enlarged to deal with corporate whistleblowers too.

The approval of the proposed bill by the cabinet is certainly a positive step towards protecting those who are trying to sanitise the system from deep-rooted corruption and bring in some accountability in various departments.My sincere hope and desire is that the bill gets introduced and passed in the parliament in the coming winter session and India joins the elite club of four democracies namely USA,UK,New Zealand and Australia to have a full-fledged law to protect its valuable whistleblowers’.