The government’s attempt to hide the report cards of central ministries and departments has come in for harsh criticism from former bureaucrats.

“The government has the tendency to hide vital information crucial to public interest,” said Kamal Kant Jaswal, former IAS officer and director of Common Cause, an NGO.

Replying to a RTI application by the Hindustan Times, the government refused to make the report cards of the ministries prepared by the performance division of the cabinet secretariat on the ground that it had not been presented before the cabinet yet. The chief information commissioner (CIC) on Monday ordered the government to release the report in 15 days. 

Jaswal, however, was doubtful if the government would comply with the CIC order.

“The report, if critical of any ministry, would embarrass the government in an election year, and therefore it is highly unlikely that it will even comply with the CIC order. I am sure it will go for an appeal,” he said.

“It is common knowledge that all work at all ministries has come to a grinding halt, so if the report is released, it will only state the obvious. However the government would not want to make it official,” he added.

Blame it on the IAS, said Kamal Taori, another former bureaucrat. “The IAS lobby is synonymous with corruption and opacity. It does not want any accountability. So it is obvious that it is reluctant to release the report card of the ministries,” he said.

Explaining why the government was hiding behind the excuse, Alok Sinha, a former IAS officer, said, the government was being overly cautious, lest its impression of being inefficient and corrupt gets strengthened. “The government is sure the adverse assessment report of the ministries would sully its image further,” he said.

PS Bawa, president, Transparency International India, said it was in the habit of the government to hide crucial information. “The public information officers are part of the same system and therefore they do their best to withhold information,” he said.

The Manmohan Singh government kicked off performance measurement programme three years ago, under which the performance of 72 central ministries and departments had to be assessed against targets fixed at the beginning of each year. The scores were to be made public by June 1 every year. However the scores were never revealed.

The CIC ruling came on a Right to Information appeal filed by HT against the cabinet secretariat’s decision to treat the report cards as a secret on the grounds that they were yet to be presented before the cabinet.

Governance Now had filed a similar RTI two years ago and hit the same roadblocks. The performance management division replying to our RTI that had asked it to release the score of all the ministries said it could not do so and trotted out the same reasons given to the HT. 

However, rejecting the cabinet secretariat’s plea of placing the report before the cabinet before it could make it public, the CIC said, “The intention to place the documents before the cabinet first cannot be a shield against disclosure of this nature.”

The performance measurement exercise, aimed at improving the governments efficiency by fixing accountability was launched in 2009.