The Predicament That Is Whistleblowing In India

By Aayush Anand

09 September, 2015
Countercurrents.org

Lalit Mehta, a civil engineer from a small town called Palamau devoted his life to transform the lives of people in one of the most backward areas of the country. On the contrary to other engineers of his qualification and calibre, he envisioned a dream not for himself but for the poor and unprivileged of the society. As secretary of the Vikash Sahyog Kendra, Lalit led volunteers in Chhatarpur to verify muster rolls and wage distribution among villagers. He came up with desecrate facts about the Rs 5 lakh nregs project to build a pond in the block. The facts revealed that the whole project was bogus and the rooster contained 108 names of which only eight were actually employed. His crusade against corruption was very effectively brought to halt by not just killing him but brutally bashing him to the extent that when his body was found it was violently mutilated with eyes gouged out and face smashed. He was not the first and definitely not the last one to pay the paramount price of being exemplary in the rather deceitful and unscrupulous governing system of this country. Satyendra Dubey, another whistleblower who blew the lead on huge financial irregularities in handling of GQ project, met his doom by being shot in Gaya. And the list of deceased social workers and whistleblowers, on the verge of exposing the amoral governing practices does not stop here.An archetypal government would work for the safety of such model crusaders but of course, ours is far from ideal.

The Whistleblower Protection act passed in parliament on February 21, 2014 states that any person, including a public servant or NGO, may make a public interest disclosure before a Competent Authority. The original draft stated that the disclosing body shall be exempted from the provisions of the Official Secrets Act, 1923. After the bill was passed by Lok Sabha, certain amendments were circulated in the Rajya Sabha that were not incorporated in the bill when it was passed in 2014.The statement of objects and reasons for the Whistleblower Protection(amendment) bill, 2015 states that the bill has been introduced to give effect to the earlier amendments which could not be passed.However there are significant divergence in the provisions of the 2015 bill with that of the 2013 amendments. In the 2013 amendment bill there were two grounds on which public interest disclosure could not be made.While in the 2015 amendments there are ten grounds including but not limited to matters related to sovereignty, strategic, scientific or economic interests of India or the incitement of an offence; deliberations of the council of ministers; that which is forbidden to be published by a court of law; that received from a foreign government; that which would impede a probe.The categories exempted from disclosure are very much identical to those exempted from the RTI act, thus making it theoretically impossible for a whistleblower to disclose anything which has not been accessed under RTI act.

By enforcing such elaborate exemptions the whistleblower protection act has been fiercely diluted discouraging any prospective whistleblowing. In India where corruption is a major issue that adversely affects its economy, the amendment will catalyse in retrogression to the olde worlde of profanity and wrongdoing. A cabinet note on the bill accessed under the right to information act revealed the legislation arguing that the citizens cannot have an absolute right to make disclosures about wrong doing. On one hand where India is slowly declining any direct accountability to citizens,there are countries like South Africa and Ghana which have no exemptions when it comes to whistleblowing while United States of America has national defense or foreign affairs exempted only in the case of presence of executive order to keep the information secret.

The war against corruption can not be won by passionate speech making or radio shows. For complete annihilation of corruption from the deepest cranny of this country, judicious policy making is required. India has already lost many meticulous individuals who could have brought significant change in the ever deteriorating scenario of governance in India, had their life not been cut short by the unscrupulous and amorals, deep rooted in the system, to protect their selves. As Ban Ki-Moon, the current secretary general of the United States has famously suggested “Corruption is measured not just in the billions of dollars of squandered or stolen government resources, but most poignantly in the absence of the hospitals, schools, clean water, roads and bridges that would have changed families and communities”. By taking away the facility of whistleblowing from common citizens the government is allowing corruption to grow its fangs again. The country needs a strong whistleblower protection act that would promote the practice of scrutinizing governmental schemes and projects. Not the one that demoralizes any prospective whistleblowing.

Aayush Anand is a third year bachelor in technology student with information technology stream, an avid blogger and information security enthusiast.