District Collector gets the ‘highest’ honour
How many times have you heard of a citizen nominating a government official for a national award?
Sounds like a rare thing in a country where administrative incompetence and corruption is more of a rule rather than an exception.
Usha Rani, the former District Collector of Mahboobnagar district, Andhra Pradesh, however, has received the rare honour of being nominated by a citizen for National RTI Awards for her work in bringing transparency and accountability in 52 departments of district administration.
Nominated by Polisetty Baalakrishna, a local in the category of public information officers (PIOs), Usha Rani (45) was District Collector of Mahboobnagar from 2006 to early 2009 when she was transferred to Khammam.
"As administrative head and First Appellate Authority, Usha Rani made sure that we got satisfactory replies to all our RTI applications," says Baalakrishna.
Suspecting corruption in a scheme of allotment of pattas (plots of land for building houses) to the poor people, in 2006, Baalakrishna filed an RTI application to find out the truth about the scheme.
After the PIO did not provide the information to Baalakrishna, he filed the first appeal with Usha Rani, a 1995 Andhra cadre IAS officer, to which he got a prompt and full reply.
The information that he received showed there were irregularities in the allotment of pattas. Finally, with Usha Rani’s help, he was able to get the deserving people to receive the pattas.
In another case, Baalakrishna and others filed 15-20 RTI applications to find out why some deserving people had not received their ration cards.
Again the request got stuck at PIO’s end and Rani, as first appellate authority, made sure that applicants got the information, which led to 20-25 deserving people getting their ration cards.
"I have always felt that RTI has come as a boon for the well-meaning bureaucrats. They are the bureaucrats who want to apply the law and resent any political interference. They now have RTI to mobilize social pressure against those who want to corrupt the system," says Rani.
Rani says she has used RTI and local language successfully to build and bring social pressure to bear on corrupt politicians and officials.
"One of the things we did was to get details of all sanctioned public works published in Telugu and posted at Gram Panchayat offices. That made everything about public works plain the common people. A lot of RTIs about public works started to get filed on that information. And a lot of irregularities were exposed," she says.
Today all contractors tend to be the relatives or friends of the politicians; the public needs to understand why, she adds.
Through Rani’s efforts, the public is also getting to understand how many crores of rupees were sanctioned for a project or scheme and how they translated into benefits for them.
Rani believes that corruption begins at the stage of policy design. "If a policy is designed in a manner that it’s too complex to operate and difficult to understand, you can be sure of corruption. What we need is polices that are designed simply and can be delivered in an uncomplicated manner," says Rani, who’s continuing her work at Khammam.
