Bowing to demands from various quarters — NGOs and political, corporate and philanthropic institutions — the Centre swiftly moved an amendment to address concerns arising from the mandatory declaration of assets and liabilities under the Lok Pal and Lokayukta Act, 2013.
While the amended Act continues to hold it is compulsory for public servants to file their returns, the form and procedure for doing so is left open with “as may be prescribed”. In doing so, it does away with sub-sections of Section 44 of the Act, which required public servants to disclose the assets of their spouse and dependent children. It also dispenses with the requirement such disclosure be made publicly available on websites, as laid down by Section 44 (6).
While this means that senior employees of NGOs will not have to file returns this year, the amendment falls short of what many NGOs wanted — to be rid of the requirement of doing so. Senior NGO employees will still have to declare their assets if the Centre decides to lay down when and how this should be done.
In other words, NGOs and their employees will still remain public servants under the Lokpal Act. Says Venkatesh Nayak of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI): “This amendment is a big setback. Unfortunately, the Indian NGO sector has brought it upon itself. Instead of challenging the categorisation of NGO workers as ‘public servants’, they chose to raise the issue of asset declaration of spouses and children. The government has used this opening to set the clock back on transparency — we are now back to where Sri Lanka was in the 1970s.”
What Nayak suggests is that under the amended law, no distinction is made between Central government employees and those of NGOs — both remain public servants. As a result, Central government employees will also no longer need to file returns on assets and liabilities.
But not everyone agrees that employees of NGOs that receive government funding should be treated differently from government employees. Says Anjali Bharadwaj of the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information (NCPRI): “An NGO gets tax breaks under Section 12-A of the IT Act, when it gets registered. When it gets funding from the Government, it is public money. Therefore, it stands to reason that the assets of all involved should be disclosed and that includes those of spouses and dependents.
There is no significant evidence of privacy being violated in the case of disclosures.”
The notifications issued in June spelt out the procedure for secretaries, managers and officers of trusts, societies and association of persons to declare their assets; the date was set as July 31. Failure to do so could invite prosecution under the Lokpal Act.
Privacy violation The unease among NGOs led some members of governing bodies and trustees — some of them independent of the organisations they were associated with to resign from their posts. Partly, this arose from a sense that their privacy was being violated by the demand that their assets had to be made public. In many cases, trustees and members of the governing body have nothing to do with the day-to-day operations of a non-profit. They are professionals chosen for their expertise in certain areas. Is it right to label them public servants?
Says Noshir Dadruwala, CEO, Centre for Advancement of Philanthropy, Mumbai: “NGOs are essentially private organisations working for public good. By what stretch of imagination does a board member or officer of an NGO become a public servant merely because, for example, the organisation receives more than Rs.10 lakh from foreign sources? And what if this is information is put up in the public domain? It would be a huge violation of concerned individuals’ privacy.”
The other concern was that a great proportion of social work is carried out by volunteers. NGOs fear this could discourage people from getting involved in social causes. “Human rights workers are mostly volunteers. Forcing them to disclose their financials is nothing but harassment aimed at driving them away from such work,” says Nikhil Dey, a human rights activist associated with the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sanghatan (MKSS).
Impracticality factor Finally, the Opposition stemmed from a suspicion that the notifications had less to do with tackling corruption than harassing civil society organisations that question the government’s decisions. Nayak draws attention to the impracticality of the Lokpal monitoring NGOs.
“India has around 6 million NGOs. Even if we assume that only 50 percent, or 3 million, are government-funded, and if we take an average of four board members and 4 staffers per NGO, that leaves us with 24 million public servants for Lokpal to monitor. Can the Lokpal manage this? Will it also have the time to monitor the 20 million public servants employed by the state?” he says.
With Zubeda Hamid. This is the second of a three-part series
