Then you give ten 9 rupees to your son and ask him to get something from the market, you ask for accounts when he is back. Did we ever ask the same from the government whom we pay crores in taxes? No. Not because we did not want to do that. We always wanted to take account of every penny that we paid as taxes but could not do so because there were no legal or administrative procedures available. Now we have the Right to Information (RTI), which empowers people to question governments and to seek any information from them. If the people ask the government and if the officer concerned does not respond within 30 days, he is liable to pay a penalty up to Rs 25,000 to be deducted from his salary. This is the first law post Independence, which directly places a relationship between the salary of an officer and his/her performance. Anna Hazare has equated RTI to the second Independence movement. The Supreme Court declared it as a part of our fundamental rights in 1976 in the case of Raj Narain vs State of UP. RTI Act 2005 prescribes the procedure to use this right. RTI is critical to the existence of democracy. If you do not have information about the functioning of the government, how would you vote in the next elections? So far, there was an information vacuum. And therefore, non-issues like caste and religion filled this vacuum. Even between two elections, it empowers people to obtain information and participate in governance. The bureaucracy's reaction to RTI has been mixed. I know one sub-divisional magistrate, who says that the time he spends in replying to RTI queries is best spent. "Ordinarily, we do not come to know what is happening in the field. But when people ask for information under RTI and when we compile that information, some of this data not only makes us aware of the field situation but also provides us an opportunity to address the many deficiencies," he said. Not all bureaucrats are so sympathetic. The attitude of an officer to RTI depends upon whether he/she is on the demand side or supply side. If a government official wants to know the details about his transfer posting or promotion under RTI from his bosses, he would come out as the biggest votary of RTI. If a citizen asks some information from the same officer, he would curse RTI for its 'misuse'. Since RTI is critical to the existence of democracy, we should be prepared to spend any amount of resources to implement it. Slowly, the number of applications under RTI is going to increase. The government may need to employ additional staff to deal with it and to keep records properly. However, experience shows that the savings that the use of RTI would enable would more than recover the money so spent. For instance, the government spends Rs 25,000 crore to provide subsidised food to the poorest of the poor. However, various surveys have shown that a huge percentage of this does not reach the beneficiaries. When RTI was used in some areas, corruption got exposed and many ration shops, which were closed for several years, started opening up. If the government spends just Rs 100 crores to implement RTI in the food department, most of the Rs 25,000 crore will start flowing in the right direction. Information commissions play the most critical role in proper implementation of RTI. If you do not get satisfactory information within 30 days, the commission has a duty to get you information and to penalise the guilty officials. Wherever you have strong information commissioners, like in Gujarat and Pune, RTI has made a huge difference to governance. However, some commissioners appear more sympathetic to the governments than to the public. The RTI should not be viewed as some kind of a fight with government officials. It is an extremely powerful weapon in our hands. It casts a greater responsibility on the people to use this weapon with extreme care and responsibility. We should ask for accounts from the government and about its activities, not to find faults with them but as a process and as a part of our duty to engage in our democracy. Many people ask