Cabinet Notes are not meant for locked cabinets

Rarely do decisions of the Union Cabinet hit the headlines these days. Most eyes are glued on to the ‘breaking news’ of the hour. Some truly deserving -- like a lifer walking out of prison after three decades. Others, merely dramatics -- somebody’s urge to chant religious incantations in public, or the wiles and woes of starlets attending an international film festival.

Since January, the government has announced 28 Cabinet decisions on matters of public interest, such as funding to raise the MSME sector’s performance, approving a policy for land use in coal-bearing areas, empowering boards of parent public sector companies to disinvest from or shut down their subsidiaries, and so on. Only one of these -- the six-month extension of PM Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana -- got the visibility that Cabinet decisions deserve.

It would be unfair to blame the media for this lack of interest in the Union Cabinet. What is labelled “newsworthy” has a lot to do with its urban audience’s ‘desire to know’. In the age of social media, this desire is often trapped in the spectrum ranging between the entertaining and the scandalous. We activists must also share the blame for not actualising our ‘right to know’ by demanding access to Cabinet Notes in a systematic manner.

A few years ago, I visited the Cabinet Secretariat office to inspect files containing decisions taken by the Modi-led Cabinet at its weekly and special meetings. Rows upon rows of shelves are meticulously stacked with Cabinet papers, put together since independence -- sarkari secrets that remain completely out of sight for citizens.

Earlier, strict confidentiality was claimed for Cabinet papers unto eternity. However, in 2005, the RTI Act lowered the bar. Secrecy is permissible only until the Cabinet makes a decision on a matter referred to it under the Transaction of Business Rules. Afterwards, not only the Cabinet’s decisions, but also the reasons informing them, and the materials used to arrive at such decisions, must be made public. The purpose of disclosure is spelt out in the RTI Act’s preamble -- to make government and its instrumentalities accountable to the governed. The Union Cabinet, the country’s highest decision-making body, is not exempt from this statutory requirement. Cabinet transparency was put to the test soon after. Thanks to the intervention of the Central Information Commission (CIC), a Cabinet Note attached to a Bill seeking to replace the Atomic Energy Act revealed that the nodal department for implementing the RTI Act was not even consulted while seeking to impose new restrictions on the transparency regime. Another Cabinet Note betrayed the establishment’s ‘progressive’ thinking -- no citizen may be permitted an absolute right to blow the whistle on corruption and wrongdoing in government.

In recent years, Cabinet Notes have been locked up again. No doubt, the government uses the Press Information Bureau to announce Cabinet decisions, but we still do not have access even to the agenda items of these meetings. The Cabinet Secretariat wants no role in making decisions about disclosure. Instead, it has palmed off this responsibility to the concerned ministries and departments. After a recent CIC order, the Social Justice Ministry emailed me a Cabinet Note relating to the implementation of the EWS quota, but I am still awaiting permission to access the Google Drive link. It is time RTI activists started demanding the mandatory disclosure of Cabinet Notes. A beginning can be made with the Criminal Procedure (Identification) Act which empowers even a head constable to collect our fingerprints, biological and handwriting samples, on a mere suspicion of being linked to a crime.