Reason why RTI (Amendment) Bill, 2019 is a Welcome Move

Government has introduced an RTI amendment bill which enables it to fix salaries and tenure of CICs: 

The government on Friday introduced a bill in Lok Sabha to amend the Right to Information Act, which would allow the Centre to decide tenure and salaries of state and central information commissioners, amid protests from opposition parties.

Introducing the Right to Information (Amendment) Bill, 2019 in Lok Sabha, minister of state in the Prime Minister’s Office Jitendra Singh said it aims at institutionalisation, streamlining and ease of delivery of RTI Act, adding that it as an enabling legislation for administration purposes. He claimed that the government’s commitment to transparency could not be questioned and blamed the then UPA government for not making proper rules to implement the RTI Act when it was enacted in 2005. 

“You have made a clumsy Act in haste. We are only trying to strengthen it,” Singh claimed.

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/bill-to-amend-rti-introduced-amid-opposition-protests/articleshow/70301535.cms

Reading about this amendment bill, it can be easily understood that this bill does not touch the core purpose of the RTI act and it is meant only for correcting the salary and tenure part. It is very simple. If Govt appoints CIC, govt should have right to decide on his salary. In original bill, CIC salary was put at par with CEC while it was realized later that CIC and CEC have diversely different roles and hence their salary etc should not be linked/matched. So this amendment will rectify it and de-couple the two positions which were never related to begin with. What is big deal? It is a simple and logical amendment.

But opposition parties are trying to create an impression as if core principle of RTI act is being touched upon in this amendment, which is totally false. 

RTI mainly brings bureaucracy under the task and hence politicians do not hate it as much as bureaucracy does. RTI became irrelevent after Modi govt came to power and large scale corruption stopped. Now we do not hear about RTI much because of this reason. The amendment is good because it gives flexibility to govt to decide on tenure and salary of CIC and it is true that CIC's role is not comparable to the role of Election Commission. So the amendment will not do any harm to the act, it will only stop CIC from becoming autocratic.

- Rahul