Information Commissions - facilitators or roadblocks?

Article 19A, access to information and empowered citizens are hugely overused and under-implemented expressions in Pakistan. Numerous Information Commissions, set up to facilitate ordinary citizens in gaining access to information, are frequently failing to see the forest for the trees, and remain insistent on running modern data and knowledge-based organisations by the 18th century colonial methods.

The RTI (Right to Information) journey began as a breath of fresh air in Pakistan. Outstanding Information Commissioners gave brilliant judgments to force public bodies to part with information that they insisted on keeping confidential. Many of these decisions had a significant impact on the delinquent practices of the elite on one hand and uplifting the lives of the downtrodden on the other.

But soon this promising journey began facing strong headwinds that could best be described by the modified ancient proverb - those whom the gods wish to destroy they first install bureaucrats over them. The RTI in Pakistan has run into numerous roadblocks, created partly by the government and largely by the Information Commissions themselves. Let's examine the reasons for this decline and its possible solutions.

While each Information Commission ought to be composed of three commissioners, the Pakistan Information Commission operates with two Commissioners, the KPK Commission with one, and the Balochistan Commission is yet to be notified. Instead of following the recommended selection process (search committees and public adverts), the government prefers to hand-pick its favourite retired bureaucrats. It is unfair to expect a bureaucrat who spent a lifetime working with files and memos to learn new concepts or adopt modern digital data-based systems.

Many Information Commissions seem to be at a loss at differentiating between information, intention, irrelevance and opinion. Consider an applicant making a request for information on 'actual salary' paid to a security guard in a government department. He may well receive a reply 'We have subcontracted guards to a 3rd party' (irrelevant), or 'we pay our contractor Rs X every month' (never asked), or 'we always pay correct wages' (an opinion), or 'we are improving our contract for the coming year' (an...