some questions related to broad meaning of democracy
Answers
Answer:
) What is the role of the Right to Information?
2) What is the role of e-democracy and how does that role relate to that of the Right to Information.
There are no one "right" answer to either of these two questions. As in any situation concerning human endeavors, what is done in practice is never exactly like the theories that are supposedly being followed, nor is there any one theory of human behaviour or rights that is universally accepted or locked in time forever more.
All that being said, I can offer my vision of both issues.
The Right to Information, from my point of view, has at it's base two major purposes: the first, giving the citizens of a given country access to the information that they need to supervise the use of power of their government. Without direct access to vital information the citizenry (and civil society organizations) cannot possiibly hope to be able to understand what decisions are being made by their government, much less be in a position to criticize or even support those decisions in an intelligent and knowledgableable manner. The second, and much more important purpose (in my opinion), is to give the citizens the information they need to be able to participate actively in policy making in general and decision making in particular. It is a well known fact that controlling any situation is much easier if you start at the planning stage as opposed to trying to change the direction of an on-going project/operation. As such, citizen participation is vitally necessary if the populace is to have any real control of the way that they are to be governed. Citizenry without a knowledge of the issues behind various questions of policy and decision making cannot possibly be part of those processes (or if they are, the result of their participation will always be a matter emotion and will be open to manipulation of those who have access to information that they can use selectively to persaude the populace in their direction).
E-democracy can either be treated as a technical application for the betterment of the performance of democratic institutions that existed before the Internet and fast electronic media, or it can be treated as a new conception of democracy in the direction of realizing something closer to direct democracy on a national (and perhaps even international) scale. From everything that I have seen and read, in most cases the first option is the one that is being pursued. I have yet to hear of any real effort of any government to find ways to allow the populace to decide on anything other than extremely local issues on new scales that didn't exist before e-democracy (public referendums have existed almost since the beginning of western democracy, so they cannot be included in a list of new democratic procedures that are a result of e-democracy). In any case, which ever of the two possibilities that I mentioned above are pursued, the role of the Right to Information will be one of the two roles that I wrote about here.
One of the problems that are liable to exist because of the existence of the Internet and fast communication is the MISUSE of "information". If in the past it was difficult to get propogranda or misleading and skewed information to the eyes and ears of the entire populace within seconds, that is no longer the case. We are continually being bombarded by various sources of information that have their own specific intentions (that are generally unknown to the public) that can, and do (in many cases) pass on only the real information that serves their purposes or pass on misinformation, for those same purposes. Once they have managed to get their version of reality to go viral, it will take an enormous effort to undo / contradict that vision of reality.
I don't know if you can consider this rather long text as an answer to your question, but I hope that I have managed to pass on some of the underlying questions that I think have to be answered before it is possible to give any kind of difinitive answer to your query.