Implementation of J & K RTI Act.2009: public awareness

In Britain, there was a trend to maintain secrecy from the very beginning, which was achieved through the Official Secrets Act, 1911. The credit of being the first country which guaranteed the Right to Information to its citizens goes to Sweden. The realization dawned that secrecy enabled corrupt officials to siphon off minimum wages and other entitlements of the poor. A movement demanding the right to information was thus born and its first champions were the disempowered rural workers in a remote rural area of Rajasthan. The RTI Act, 2009 will be completing 9years of its enactment. The regime to information has been set up since needs to be examined and assessed in the context of awareness of public of the main provisions of the Act. The basic theory of democracy stands on the assumption that citizens would contribute their judgments over the performance of their rulers and decide on their policy choices with the help of information about policies and programs as well as the level of actual performance of the power-holders. A movement demanding the right to information was thus born and its first champions were the disempowered rural workers in a remote rural area of Rajasthan. As a result, to combat the corruption and to promote the Good Governance, the state responded in the form of Right to Information Act, 2005. The Right to Information is, again, enormously significant insofar as it is intrinsically related to some other civil rights which would lose their teeth and become impotent unless the appropriate information is available.