Right to Informatiom

Governments do not seem to like RTI acts:Blair regrets passing freedom of information law. In today's Age Reform on FOI bogs down :
"FEDERAL freedom of information reforms have stalled, with government spending on high-performance shredding machines easily outstripping funding for public servants to handle requests for information."
Compared to this, from Shekhar Singh's articleThe Genesis and Evolution of the Right to Information Regime in India
"Both studies came to the conclusion that awareness about the RTI Act was still very low, especially among rural populations and among women. Fortunately, surveys done in rural areas as a part of the People’s Assessment estimated that in the first two and a half years of the RTI Act (Oct 2005 to March 2008) there were an estimated two million RTI applications filed across the country, of which an estimated 400,000 RTI applications were filed from the rural areas, belying the impression that only the educated urban people used the RTI Act."
The article of Shekhar Singh is from
TRANSPARENT GOVERNANCE IN SOUTH ASIA published by INDIAN INSTITUTE OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION and is available online.
In addition India also has a number of Social Audit activists, apparently in states like Andhra Pradesh to monitor the progress of various government programs partly using RTI.