Right to Information: A Frankenstein's Monster?

RTI is a radical piece of legislation and a widely used one by the general public. It is a powerful tool to gain access to information from public bodies. The genuine activism and concern over public issues and redress of genuine grievance of the citizen should ideally form the motive for invoking rights under RTI Act. But unfortunately this is not happening in respect of all RTI applications that land in government departments or public bodies day in and day out. Moreover, RTI is also applicable to PSUs which are primarily commercial enterprises and have to take care of issues such as cost, productivity, competitiveness, profit etc. There are also matters which relate to performance apprisals of employees and commercial information such as business stastistics. Decision making in government and public sector is already slow and ineffective and tools such as RTI make the matters worse. An unchecked RTI is not a boon but a bane. Here are a few suggestions:

1) Take the PSUs out of RTI purview: There are industry level regulators, watchdogs, ombudsmen that can do the job of redressing grievances of customers and other parties. Time and resources in a commercial enterprise are important elements in achieving profitability and competitiveness and we cannot expect PSU employees to spend time attending RTI applications.
2) Dilute the RTI substantially in respect of federal level organizations such as a central ministry. The watered down version of RTI Act should empower only respected media organizations (short listed based on readership/viewership data) to seek access to information under RTI and not any Tom, Dick and Harry. There are wheeler-dealers and agents who are out to destabilize government of the day by dropping in an RTI query.
3) In respect of local and state level bodies, empower all citizens to seek access to information. The citizens should primarily concern themselves with basic public services delivered by such local/regional bodies and therefore rights under RTI should be restricted to such grievances only rather than any fancy debate between two ministries of the central government on any abstract policy matter.
4) Cap the number of applications an applicant can make during one year (proxies may be used to bypass such rule but still there should be some bar on total no. of applications made)