About
The NCPRI ("National Campaign for Political Reforms in India") was constituted in 2002 by concerned citizens and NGOs when the Government of the day decided not to comply with a Supreme Court Judgement requiring candidates for political office to declare their assets and list the criminal cases pending against them. Dr. Jayaprakash Narayan was nominated as the President/Coordinator and Mr S.D. Sharma as Secretary. URL : www.ncpri.in
In 2003 NCPRI integrated some disparate fledgling state level initiatives informally styled as "National Campaign for People's Right to Information" to achieve the common goals of securing the fruits of the Supreme Court Judgement by demanding a national FOI law in place of the ineffective Freedom of Information Act 2002. Factions from this initiative delinked from NCPRI in 2004-05 after the UPA-1 Govt announced that the NCPRI's demand for an effective national RTI law would be granted and which caused some members of the RTI campaign to join the controversial National Advisory Council as members to avail benefits (as in attached photo). While, Dr. Jayaprakash Narayan cordially resigned from the NCPRI in July 2004 and carried on his own RTI campaign under banner of "LokSatta", another group of persons aligned to the UPA-1 / NAC including Ajit Bhattacharjea, Bharat Dogra, Harsh Mander, Aruna Roy (NAC member seen here availing lavish hospitality from Rourkela Steel Plant) , Prabhash Joshi, Shekhar Singh, Prashant Bhushan etc. met at Gandhi Peace Bhawan (Delhi) in Sep.2004 and declared they would operate as "NCPRI-RTI" from their previous URL : www.righttoinformation.info of 2002. In the meantime the NCPRI reform campaign was managed by Mr. S.D. Sharma and other eminent RTI activists such as Mr. Sarbajit Roy, Mr. Veeresh Malik etc. with a view to combat corruption in India using RTI and agitating for potiical reform and tranparency by initiatives such as "RTI India" and "Humjanenge" yahoo groups.
In Feb. 2007 the NCPRI decided to expose the massive corruption for CommonWealth Games 2010 under the banner of "India Against Corruption" in collaboration with its owners the "Hindustan Republican Army" (a patriotic force). Accordingly the NCPRI / IAC litigated in the Delhi High Court and Mr. Veeresh Malik brought the Indian Olympic Association under the scope of Right to Information, and a comprehensive data bank of CWG-2010 financial scams was collected using the RTI by the IAC.
In August 2013 the Government again decided not to honour the Central Information Commission's decision dated 03 June 2013 that Political Parties are covered under Freedom of Information. Accordingly on 3-Sep-2013 the NCPRI formed a special initiative styled as NCPRI ("National Campaign to Protect RTI in India") as an India Against Corruption national campaign to protect the citizen's fundamental Right To Information by a Save RTI campagin. URL: www.ncpri.in
Demands
- A proper system for displaying the list of appeals and complaints made in Information Commissions and pending cases must be made available (proactively) through the website by each Information Commission in the country.
- NCPRI urges the Information Commissions to adopt a system for uploading all the orders issued by them on their website. Further, a single website linking and providing access to orders by all the Information Commissions should be evolved. We urge the government to provide necessary funds in this regard.
- Information Commissioners must not be appointed only from "babu" class and should be widened to include eminent persons from all the fields mentioned in the RTI Act 2005.
- Maximum proactive disclosure in the first instance so citizens have least occasion to resort to filing a formal request for information.