Ask MEA

The Ministry of External Affairs has started posting all Right to Information (RTI) queries, and its replies to them, on its website, mea.gov.in. Aimed at ensuring transparency, it has become a disincentive for journalists because the replies are posted on the website before they receive it. This makes the information public, robbing the journalists of exclusive news. A quick look at the RTI queries posted on the website shows while a number of them relate to professional matters such as transfers and postings, there are also some random and funny ones. One applicant asked whether Indian men were sent to Vietnam between 1975 and 1980 to procreate as the population of men had plummeted during the war. One Kuldeep Sharma from Jaipur requested information on the number of countries in the Asian continent as well as the contact details of shops in Delhi that sold flags of these countries.