Accountability and Control

The Problem This Topic Answers

A permanent, expert, unelected service exercises enormous discretionary power over citizens who never chose it and cannot remove it. Accountability is the set of arrangements by which that power is answered for. The subject exists because the administrative state made the classical answer, that officials merely execute what elected representatives decide, factually untrue.

Accountability, Responsibility, Responsiveness

• Accountability is the obligation to render an account of one's conduct to an authority empowered to judge it and to impose consequences. It is external, formal and enforceable, and it is retrospective: it operates after the act.
• Responsibility is the internal sense of obligation to a professional standard, a code or a conscience. It is prospective and self-enforcing, and it operates at the moment of decision rather than after it.
• Responsiveness is the disposition to act on the felt needs of citizens rather than merely within the rules. An administration can be perfectly accountable and wholly unresponsive, which is the usual complaint against Indian bureaucracy, and the reason the two words must not be used interchangeably in an answer.

The Kinds of Accountability

Answerability runs along several lines at once, and an answer that distinguishes them can explain why an administration may be tightly controlled on one axis and wholly unaccountable on another.

• Political accountability, running through the minister to the legislature and finally to the electorate. It is the constitutionally central line and the weakest in practice, because it reaches individual administrative acts only when they become politically salient.
• Legal accountability, to the courts, which is precise, enforceable and available only for illegality.
• Hierarchical or administrative accountability, to superiors within the organisation. It covers every act, which no other line does, and it is compromised whenever the superior's own interest is implicated.
• Financial accountability, through audit and the legislature's financial committees.
• Professional accountability, to the standards of a calling, which is Friedrich's inner check institutionalised.
• Social or public accountability, to citizens directly through information, charters, social audit, the press and civil society. This is the line that has grown most in India since 2005, and it works by making the other lines operable rather than by replacing them.

Why the Problem Grew

Three developments made control a live question rather than a settled one.

• The expansion of the state. As government moved from order-keeping to welfare, planning and regulation, the range of decisions taken by officials rather than legislators expanded with it. Herman Finer observed that the state is present everywhere and hardly leaves a gap, and Dwight Waldo named the result the Administrative State in his 1948 book, elaborating the power and responsibilities of an administration that implements all the policies of government without being elected by anyone, which was said in the United States debate to be against the spirit of democracy.
• Delegated legislation. In theory policy formulation belongs to the legislature. In practice, from paucity of time and lack of technical skill, legislatures pass only the skeleton of a policy and the executive adds the flesh and blood, which is why delegated legislation is also called executive legislation.
• Administrative discretion. Modern statutes confer wide discretion because the situations they govern cannot be specified in advance. Discretion is necessary and it is also the space in which arbitrariness lives.

The Friedrich and Finer Debate

The theoretical core of the topic is an exchange between Carl J. Friedrich and Herman Finer in the years around 1940, prompted by a United States federal government that was becoming an administrative state in which administrative organs had grown more powerful than a Congress criticised for merely rubber-stamping administrative rules.

Friedrich, in Public Policy and the Nature of Administrative Responsibility (1940), argued that given the incapacity of the legislature to control administration in detail, administrators must fulfil their responsibilities autonomously. His controls are internal: the inner check of professional standards, technical knowledge and the judgement of one's professional peers. Responsibility to the canons of one's craft, he held, is a sturdier guarantee than an oversight that cannot keep pace.

Finer replied in Administrative Responsibility in Democratic Government (1941) that even if the administrative state is inevitable, external control remains essential. His formulation is the one to quote: the servants of the public are not to decide their own course, but are to be responsible to the elected representatives of the public. An inner check is no check at all, because it leaves the official as judge in his own cause.

Neither position is sufficient alone, and the modern architecture of accountability is a compromise between them. External control supplies the sanction, and codes of conduct, professional training and administrative ethics supply what external control cannot reach: the vast majority of decisions no one will ever review.

Legislative Control

In a parliamentary system the legislature controls administration indirectly, through the ministers who are responsible to it, under the doctrine of collective and individual ministerial responsibility.

Control Through Debate and Motion

• The President's address at the opening of a session sets out the major policies and activities with which the executive will be occupied. Four days are set aside for general discussion before the vote of thanks is passed, and members may in that period criticise the entire realm of administration for its acts of commission and omission. The speeches tend to sway opinion outside Parliament as much as inside it.
• The budget. The finance minister's speech opens a review of the administration's functioning. General discussion follows on the budget as a whole or on any question of principle in it; voting on grants provides an occasion to criticise; discussion on the Finance Bill permits any subject to be raised and any grievance ventilated; and while considering demands for grants, Parliament examines the working of individual departments.
• Question Hour, in which ministers answer starred questions orally with supplementaries and unstarred questions in writing, is the most-used instrument and reaches individual administrative acts that no other device touches.
• Zero Hour, calling attention motions and adjournment motions raise matters of urgent public importance, the adjournment motion carrying an element of censure because it sets aside the business of the House.
• No-confidence and censure motions. A censure motion brings the whole or part of government policy under fire, and an adverse vote leads to resignation. In practice a no-confidence motion is difficult to carry, since the party or coalition that commands the majority forms the government, so the device operates largely as a threat that keeps the government alert.

Control Through Committees

Debate on the floor is episodic and partisan, so the effective scrutiny is done in committee.

• The Public Accounts Committee examines the appropriation accounts and the reports of the Comptroller and Auditor General, asking whether money was spent on the purpose for which it was voted and within the authority governing it. It works after the event, and by convention its chairman is drawn from the Opposition.
• The Estimates Committee examines the estimates and suggests economies, improvements in organisation and efficiency, and alternative policies to achieve the same result at less cost. It works continuously rather than only after audit, and it is confined to the Lok Sabha.
• The Committee on Public Undertakings examines the reports and accounts of public sector enterprises, which the other two committees could not adequately reach.
• The Departmentally Related Standing Committees cover the ministries between them, examining demands for grants, bills referred to them, annual reports and long-term policy documents. Their creation is the single most significant strengthening of parliamentary control in the Indian system, because they are permanent, subject-specialised and less exposed to party heat than the floor of the House.
• The Committee on Subordinate Legislation, constituted in both Houses, scrutinises rules, regulations, bye-laws and schemes made under delegated legislation, and is the direct answer to the delegation problem.

The Comptroller and Auditor General

The office originated in the United Kingdom under the Exchequer and Audit Departments Act 1866, which combined the functions of the Comptroller-General of the Exchequer, who had authorised the issue of public monies to departments since 1834, with those of the commissioners of audit, who had presented government accounts to the treasury. The Act kept the comptroller function of authorising issues and added the new task of examining departmental accounts and reporting the results to Parliament.

In India the CAG is created by the Constitution and examines the financial transactions of the administration. As an officer of the legislature functioning independently, the CAG audits all expenditure from union and state revenues incurred within or outside India, and the audit extends across a wide range of state activity, including departments and offices, funds administered by them, revenue collection, non-commercial state-sponsored bodies, and bodies such as universities.

The important modern development is the value for money examination, which looks at the economy, efficiency and effectiveness with which an entity has used its resources and discharged its functions. It moves audit beyond the question of whether money was spent lawfully to whether it was spent well, and it is the instrument by which audit reaches policy outcomes. It is also the ground on which audit is accused of straying into policy, which is the standing tension of the office.

What Audit Actually Examines

• Regularity or compliance audit asks whether expenditure was incurred with proper authority, against a sanctioned grant, and in accordance with the rules. It is the oldest form and the narrowest.
• Propriety audit goes beyond legality to ask whether the expenditure was prudent: whether public money was spent with the care a person of ordinary prudence would apply to their own, whether the order conferred a benefit on an individual, and whether the allowance was reasonable. It is the audit of wisdom within the law, and it is inherently contestable.
• Performance or value for money audit examines economy, efficiency and effectiveness in the use of resources, reaching the outcome rather than the transaction.

The limitations are real and worth stating. Audit is post-facto, so the money is already spent; it depends on the PAC and the department to act on its findings, and it has no power of its own to enforce them; and the further it moves from regularity towards performance, the more it is accused of substituting its judgement for the executive's on questions of policy. The tension is not a defect in the office but the price of making audit useful.

The Presidential Variant

Where the separation of powers applies, as in the United States, the mechanisms differ entirely: no-confidence motions, adjournment motions and question hours are meaningless there. Congress instead creates executive departments, boards, commissions and agencies by law; Senate approval is required for senior presidential appointments and for treaties; the legislature controls receipts through taxation and debt and expenditure through the appropriation Act; it creates independent regulatory commissions accountable to itself; it appoints investigating committees which the administration greatly fears; and it holds the power of impeachment. The comparison is worth making in an answer, because legislative control in a presidential system is more direct over the agency and less able to reach the political executive.

Limits of Legislative Control

The honest assessment in the literature is that these devices are of greater theoretical than practical efficacy, and that legislative control is inadequate. The reasons are structural rather than remediable by exhortation.

• The government commands the majority, so the body meant to control the executive is led by it.
• Legislators lack the technical expertise and the staff to examine complex administration, and anti-defection discipline removes the independence that scrutiny requires.
• Time is short, the volume of business is large, and much of it is passed with little discussion, including guillotined demands for grants.
• Control is largely post-facto: the PAC examines what audit reports on, often years after the transaction.
• Because members must spend so much effort on parochial and partisan affairs, sustained control over larger policy is not possible, and control of the bureaucracy can only be haphazard.

Executive Control

Executive control is internal control over civil servants who are themselves part of the machinery of executive government. A chain of command runs through the administrative machinery, officials are responsible to and under the control of their administrative superiors, and at the top are ministers responsible for everything in their departments. If a civil servant errs, the minister in charge is ultimately answerable.

• Political control. The minister has full authority to manage and direct the department, lays down policy, issues directives, and must be informed of all important decisions. A minister may concentrate authority, transfer officials and cut through red tape. In practice, because civil servants are the experts, they exert substantial influence on ministers, so a minister's real control depends not only on the legal and constitutional system but on the personal and political resources brought to the office.
• Control over personnel. The executive regulates recruitment and conditions of service, and the political executive is concerned with appointment, promotion, transfer and removal. This is described in the literature as the most effective means of executive control over administration. It is also the most abused: transfer used as a sanction is the standard instrument of political pressure on Indian officers, and it works precisely because it is effective.
• Budgetary control. The finance ministry sanctions expenditure, scrutinises proposals and imposes financial rules, which gives it a continuous check on every department.
• Direct control through commissions and investigation, exercised through bodies such as the Central Vigilance Commission and the Central Bureau of Investigation.
• Delegated legislation and rule-making, through which the executive supplies the detail of policy. The legislature formulates the outline and the executive frames the implementing guidelines, subject to the scrutiny of the parliamentary committees on subordinate legislation.
• Ordinance-making power, which allows the political executive to legislate when Parliament is not in session and an emergency requires it.
• Civil service rules and disciplinary proceedings, which supply the formal sanction against individual misconduct.

Judicial Control

Judicial control is the citizen's remedy against the administration, available on the initiative of the aggrieved rather than at the discretion of a legislature or a superior.

Grounds

• Lack of jurisdiction, where the authority acted beyond the power conferred, or where the power was exercised by the wrong body.
• Error of law apparent on the face of the record.
• Abuse of discretion, including acting on irrelevant considerations, ignoring relevant ones, acting for an improper purpose, or acting in bad faith.
• Violation of natural justice, under the two rules that no one may be a judge in his own cause and that no one may be condemned unheard, extended in modern law to the duty to give reasons.
• Unreasonableness, where a decision is so unreasonable that no reasonable authority could have reached it.

The Writs

The writ system is an English inheritance. Writs were originally written orders issued in the name of the king on a petition to the king-in-council, treated as royal orders and forming the groundwork for subsequent proceedings. They commanded that a case be brought before the issuing court or that the recipient do some other act. Originally exceptional and non-routine devices issued by the Crown in the Crown's interest, they later became available to ordinary citizens on payment of a prescribed fee, the filing being known as the purchase of a writ. New writs could be created only with the sanction of Parliament, and their forms remained essentially static, each defining a particular form of action.

Writ	What it does
Habeas corpus	Requires a detained person to be produced, and tests the legality of the detention
Mandamus	Commands a public authority to perform a public duty it has refused to perform
Prohibition	Restrains a lower court or tribunal from exceeding its jurisdiction, issued while proceedings are pending
Certiorari	Quashes an order already passed without jurisdiction or against natural justice
Quo warranto	Questions the authority by which a person holds a public office

In England the Woolf Reforms and the Civil Procedure Rules of 1999 unified most High Court and County Court civil procedure, so that almost all civil actions now begin with a claim form rather than a writ. The United States inherited the English system as a rigid set of forms of relief, abolished several writs by name, and now grants most of the old relief through ordinary civil action, though a few writs survive in federal practice. India retained the writs as constitutional remedies, which is the significant difference: the remedy is a fundamental right rather than a procedural form.

Administrative Tribunals

Tribunals grew because ordinary courts were slow, expensive and unspecialised, and because the disputes thrown up by a welfare state are technical and numerous. They offer speed, expertise and informality, and they carry a matching risk: being staffed partly from the administration, they may lack the independence that makes adjudication worth having. The debate over the composition and appointment of tribunal members, and over the exclusion of High Court jurisdiction, is therefore not a technicality but the whole question of whether a tribunal is a court or an extension of the department.

Limits of Judicial Control

• It is slow and expensive, which makes it unavailable to those most exposed to administrative arbitrariness, and public interest litigation is a partial correction to precisely this.
• It is available only after the injury, and only to someone who knows a remedy exists.
• Courts examine legality rather than wisdom, so an inefficient, insensitive or merely foolish decision that stays within the law is beyond their reach. This is the crucial limitation, because most administrative failure is of that kind.
• Judicial intervention in policy raises its own accountability question, since the reviewing judge is no more elected than the official reviewed.

The Ombudsman, Lokpal and Lokayukta

The ombudsman institution answers a gap the three classical controls leave open: maladministration that is legal, within jurisdiction, and beyond the practical reach of Parliament, yet unjust to the individual affected.

The Model Abroad

In the Scandinavian model the ombudsman is elected by Parliament by simple majority, with status equal to that of the president of the supreme court. The jurisdiction is comprehensive, extending to all public officials and to members of local government. The ombudsman is not a member of Parliament but has the right to speak and participate in its proceedings, and submits an annual report to it. In the United Kingdom the office is known as the Parliamentary Commissioner, created in 1967 and functioning from 1969, empowered to take up administrative cases that no court or tribunal can admit, and reporting annually to Parliament.

The Indian Story

• A constitutional ombudsman was first proposed in Parliament in the 1960s by the then Law Minister Ashok Kumar Sen, and the terms Lokpal and Lokayukta were coined by L.M. Singhvi in 1963.
• The first Administrative Reforms Commission, under Morarji Desai, recommended in 1966 two independent institutions, a Lokpal at the centre and Lokayuktas in the states, to look into complaints against public officials and against MPs and MLAs respectively.
• A Lokpal Bill was introduced in 1968 and passed by the Lok Sabha but lapsed in the Rajya Sabha. Between 1968 and 2001 bills were introduced seven times without result.
• In 2002 the commission to review the working of the Constitution, headed by M.N. Venkatachaliah, recommended the appointment of Lokpal and Lokayuktas, with the office of the Prime Minister kept outside the Lokpal's purview.
• In 2005 the second ARC, headed by Veerappa Moily, recommended the same institutions at the centre and in the states.
• In 2011 a group of ministers under Pranab Mukherjee endorsed their creation, and in the same year the India Against Corruption movement led by Anna Hazare brought decisive public pressure.
• India is a signatory to the United Nations Convention against Corruption, which obliged the government to act.

The Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act, 2013

Status	Statutory body under the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act, 2013; Lokpal at the centre, Lokayukta in the states
Composition	A chairperson and up to eight members, of whom half are judicial members; at least half the members to be from SCs, STs, OBCs, minorities and women
Judicial member	A serving or retired judge of the Supreme Court, or a serving or retired Chief Justice of a High Court
Non-judicial member	An eminent person with at least twenty-five years of experience and special knowledge of anti-corruption policy, public administration, vigilance, finance, insurance, banking, law or management
Appointment	By the President, on the recommendation of a selection committee of the Prime Minister, the Speaker of the Lok Sabha, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, the Chief Justice of India or a judge nominated by him, and an eminent jurist

The Act brings the Prime Minister within jurisdiction, subject to exclusions for international relations, external and internal security, public order, atomic energy and space, and to procedural safeguards requiring a substantial majority of the full bench to initiate an inquiry. Its weaknesses are widely noted: the long delay in making the first appointment, the dependence on the government for staff and investigating machinery, the absence of constitutional status, and the fact that an institution created to check corruption is appointed by a committee dominated by the executive it is meant to check.

The Central Vigilance Commission

The CVC was set up on the recommendation of the Santhanam Committee on Prevention of Corruption in 1964 as an executive body, and was given statutory status by the Central Vigilance Commission Act, 2003, following the Supreme Court's direction in the Vineet Narain case. It is a multi-member body consisting of a Central Vigilance Commissioner and two Vigilance Commissioners, appointed by the President on the recommendation of a committee of the Prime Minister, the Home Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. It supervises the vigilance administration of central government organisations, exercises superintendence over the Delhi Special Police Establishment in corruption cases, and tenders advice on disciplinary proceedings. Its central weakness is that its recommendations are advisory, so the department it advises decides whether to act.

The Anti-Corruption Machinery

Corruption is the failure mode that accountability arrangements exist to prevent, and India's legal apparatus against it has three main components.

The Prevention of Corruption Act

The Santhanam Committee on Prevention of Corruption reported in 1964 and produced both the Central Vigilance Commission and the framework of modern anti-corruption law. The Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988 consolidated the offences relating to public servants.

The Prevention of Corruption (Amendment) Act, 2018 made three significant changes. It criminalised bribe-giving as a distinct offence, where the earlier law concentrated on the recipient. It redefined criminal misconduct, narrowing it substantially. And it inserted section 17A, which bars any police officer from conducting an enquiry, inquiry or investigation into an offence under the Act where the allegation relates to a recommendation made or a decision taken by a public servant in the discharge of official functions, without the prior approval of the competent authority.

Section 17A is the provision worth arguing about in an answer, because the two readings of it are both defensible. On one view it is a necessary safeguard: without it, officials facing the prospect of investigation for any honest decision that later looks wrong will stop deciding at all, and the resulting paralysis is itself an administrative failure. On the other it is a gateway controlled by the executive, requiring the government's permission before its own servants can be investigated, which reproduces at the investigative stage exactly the dependence that weakens the Lokpal and the information commissions.

Whistle-blower Protection

Internal disclosure is the only mechanism that reaches corruption before it is complete, since the people who know are the people inside. The Whistle Blowers Protection Act, 2014 was passed by both Houses and received assent, and it has still not been brought into force, the stated reason being that it requires amendment to safeguard against disclosures affecting the sovereignty and integrity of India and the security of the state.

The consequence is that India has a statutory protection that exists on paper and not in operation, which is Riggs's formalism appearing in the accountability machinery itself. It matters directly for RTI, because an applicant who exposes wrongdoing has no statutory protection, and the risk falls on precisely the people the system most needs.

The Central Bureau of Investigation

The CBI investigates corruption cases under the Delhi Special Police Establishment Act, under the superintendence of the CVC in such cases following the Supreme Court's directions in the Vineet Narain case. Its structural weakness is that it requires the consent of a state government to operate in that state, and that its officers' careers remain with their parent cadres, so that the agency's independence is a function of the goodwill of the governments it investigates.

The Citizen and the Administration

Citizens' Charters

A citizens' charter is a public declaration by an organisation of the services it provides, the standards to which it will provide them, the time limits it accepts, the remedy available when it fails and the expectations it has of the citizen. Its logic is to convert a discretionary favour into a published entitlement, so that failure becomes visible and comparable.

In India the initiative began in 1997 and now covers a large number of central and state agencies, with Sevottam developed as the assessment framework for service delivery. The recurring criticisms are that charters are drafted without consulting the citizens or the frontline staff who must deliver them, that they are not revised, that the standards are pitched to what the office already achieves, and above all that they are not legally enforceable, which reduces a charter to an advertisement.

Right to Public Services Legislation

The answer to the charter's central weakness, that it is not enforceable, is to give the promise statutory force. Madhya Pradesh was the first state to do so, enacting and implementing the Public Services Guarantee Act on 18 August 2010. It notified fifty-two key public services, among them caste, birth, marriage and domicile certificates, drinking water connections, ration cards and copies of land records, and fixed a time period for the delivery of each. Failure attracts a penalty on the designated officer and an appeal to a superior.

Most states have since enacted comparable legislation. The significance for this topic is conceptual rather than merely administrative: the Acts convert service delivery from a discretionary act of administration into an enforceable entitlement of the citizen, which is the same move RTI made for information, and they attach the sanction to the individual officer rather than to the department, which is the only form of sanction that reliably changes behaviour.

The Press and Public Interest Litigation

Two instruments outside the formal machinery do much of the work in practice. The press supplies the publicity on which every other mechanism depends, since parliamentary questions, audit paragraphs and court proceedings mostly begin with something reported. Its limits are its own ownership structure and its preference for episode over pattern.

Public interest litigation relaxed the rule of locus standi so that a person acting bona fide in the interest of others could move the court, which answered the defect that judicial remedies were available only to those able to reach a court. It has produced significant administrative accountability in prisons, environment, food security and bonded labour. It also raises its own objection, that a court directing administration through continuing mandamus is making policy without the information or the accountability the executive has, and the balance between the two is an open question rather than a settled one.

Technology as an Accountability Instrument

Electronic delivery changes accountability by changing what can be hidden. Online records create an audit trail that cannot be selectively lost; direct benefit transfer removes intermediaries between the sanction and the beneficiary; and public dashboards make performance comparable across districts, which is a sharper discipline than any report. The qualification is that transparency of data is not the same as accountability for outcomes, and a system can publish everything while answering for nothing.

Social Audit

Social audit is the counterpart of the official audit, and the difference is structural rather than procedural. Government audits are conducted in-house or by external professional auditing institutions, without significant involvement of the affected persons or intended beneficiaries; they assess output rather than outcome, that is, the quantity of work rather than its quality; and the arrangement is corruptible because those conducting the audit have no real stake in what they audit.

Social audits are conducted jointly by the government and the people, especially by those affected by or intended to benefit from the activity audited. Their principles are participation, a rights-based entitlement for all affected persons, and not merely their representatives, to take part in decision making and validation; and accountability, the immediate answerability of elected representatives and government functionaries to all concerned and affected people for action or inaction. The difficulties are real: there is a lack of uniformity and methodology in conducting them, and local factors affect their efficiency. The statutory social audit of MGNREGA works, and its limits show exactly where the method is strong and where it depends on the very local power it is auditing.

Civil Society

Civil society bodies supply what the formal machinery cannot: they identify the grievance before it reaches a forum, aggregate individual complaints into a pattern, sustain attention between elections, and supply the technical capacity that individual citizens lack. The MKSS campaign in Rajasthan, which began as a demand for wage records and ended in the national right to information, is the clearest Indian demonstration that accountability instruments are usually won from below rather than granted from above.

The Fourth Estate in Chains

The press can hold government to account only if it is itself free and credible. The claim that the fourth estate is in chains points to constraints from five directions.

• Ownership. Media houses are increasingly owned by corporate groups with interests in other sectors, and some by politicians. Cross-media ownership concentrates influence, and the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India's recommendations on media ownership (2014) to limit it have not been acted on. An owner with business before the government has reason to soften coverage.
• Revenue. Dependence on advertising, including government advertising, makes hostile reporting costly. In Common Cause v Union of India (2015) the Supreme Court laid down guidelines on government advertising to prevent its use for political patronage.
• Paid news. News space sold as advertising without disclosure was documented by a Press Council of India sub-committee in 2010, and the Election Commission treats it as election expenditure. In 2011 the Commission disqualified a legislator, Umlesh Yadav, for failing to account for paid news.
• Law. Criminal defamation, upheld in Subramanian Swamy v Union of India (2016) and retained in the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, and costly civil suits are used to intimidate journalists. Sedition was put in abeyance by the Supreme Court in 2022, but offences against sovereignty and unity, internet shutdowns and the regulation of digital news under the Information Technology Rules, 2021 add pressure. The courts have pushed back: Shreya Singhal v Union of India (2015) struck down Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, Anuradha Bhasin v Union of India (2020) required internet suspensions to be proportionate, and Madhyamam Broadcasting v Union of India (2023) held that criticism of government policy cannot be branded anti-establishment to justify a ban.
• Weak regulation. The Press Council of India, under the Press Council Act, 1978, covers only print and can only warn, admonish or censure. Television news is regulated by industry bodies with modest sanctions, and digital media have no independent regulator.

Some chains are self-made. Ratings-driven sensationalism, media trials that prejudge accused persons, polarised coverage and the decline of costly investigative reporting have eroded credibility. The media has become, in one reading, more a societal lens than an institutional one: it amplifies public sentiment, increasingly through social media, rather than scrutinising institutions systematically. Yet it still exposes failures, from procurement scams to custodial violence, that then reach Parliament and the courts.

Making the media more responsible and impartial requires disclosure of ownership and financial interests, limits on cross-media concentration, an independent regulator for all media with powers beyond censure, neutral and transparent allocation of government advertising, a review of criminal defamation, protection for journalists, and support for public-service and investigative journalism. Accountability of government through the media depends on the accountability of the media itself.

The Right to Information

RTI means access to reasonable information, files and documents concerning government operations and performance, available to citizens and to non-governmental organisations. It is the precondition of every other accountability mechanism, because a control that cannot see what was done cannot judge it.

Origins

• Sweden was the first country to provide access to information as a constitutional provision, in 1766.
• The United States granted the right through the Freedom of Information Act, 1966, a comprehensive law for transparency in public administration.
• In India, the inherited obstacle was the Official Secrets Act, 1923, which gave administrators the discretion to decide what information to release and how much, producing an administration low in accountability, responsibility and transparency.
• The Supreme Court laid the groundwork in Raj Narain (1976) and S.P. Gupta (1981), holding that no accountable government can survive without the right to information, and treating it as consistent with the fundamental rights under Articles 19 and 21. RTI in India is therefore an inferred constitutional right given statutory shape, not a concession by the legislature.
• The World Bank has treated the right to information as an important element of good governance, and many countries regard it as a fundamental right because of its connection to freedom of speech and expression.

The Right to Information Act, 2005

The Act obliges every public authority to designate Public Information Officers, to disclose specified categories of information proactively under section 4 so that citizens need not ask, and to answer requests within thirty days, or within forty-eight hours where the information concerns the life or liberty of a person. Refusals are appealable within the authority and then to the Central or State Information Commission, which can order disclosure and impose penalties on the officer who withheld it. Section 8 lists the exemptions, including national security, foreign relations, commercial confidence, cabinet papers and personal information, subject to a public interest override.

Why It Matters

• Accountability is supplemented through the transparency RTI creates.
• It counters a maladapted bureaucratic setup, reducing corruption and the status-quoist tendency of bureaucracy.
• It serves the public interest by discouraging arbitrariness in administrative decision making.
• It empowers people and raises rights consciousness among them.
• It facilitates participation and makes bureaucracy democratic, accountable and responsive.
• It admits honest public criticism into public administration and helps it adapt to the changing needs of the social system.
• It is consonant with the public choice approach, which seeks to empower the citizen against the monopoly provider.

Limits and the 2019 Amendment

The practical problems are the pendency of appeals before information commissions, vacancies in those commissions, the wide use of section 8 exemptions, poor compliance with proactive disclosure under section 4 which forces citizens to file requests for what ought to be published, and the exposure of applicants in sensitive cases, which the absence of adequate whistle-blower protection makes serious.

The structural change came with the Right to Information (Amendment) Act, 2019, which removed from the Act the provisions fixing the tenure and salary of the Chief Information Commissioner and the Information Commissioners, and empowered the central government to prescribe them by rules. Under the Right to Information Rules notified on 24 October 2019, the term was fixed at three years, and the central government retained discretion over allowances and service conditions not specifically covered, with its decisions binding and the power to relax the rules resting with it.

The criticism is not about the numbers but about who sets them. An information commission whose members' tenure and terms are at the discretion of the government they adjudicate against has lost the security that made it an independent authority, which returns the topic to Finer's objection: an accountability institution dependent on the body it holds accountable is not an external control at all.