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By ANIT MUKHERJEE

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh boosted transparency in 2005 when he passed the Right to Information Act, or RTI, designed to give citizens better access to government records. But for the past couple of months, Mr. Singh has been talking about revisiting the act—for the worse.

Mr. Singh’s says he wants to protect the “deliberative processes” of officials who now claim to be bogged down by RTI petitions seeking documents. More likely, those officials are scared of writing memos that reflect what they really think, lest that memo should suddenly become a liability when released under the act. The government wants to dilute the RTI by creating lots of exceptions for what information a citizen can access. Instead the act needs to be strengthened.

The passage of the act has improved accountability to some extent and enhanced ordinary citizens’ understanding of government and politics. Hence, for instance, government bureaucracies that deliver services, like passports or driving licenses, are increasingly responsive to citizens who can drop the threat of an RTI to get work done faster. This is introducing an element of transparency in decision making.

But this hasn’t been enough. The big problem is that the government’s implementation of RTI is weak. Caveats for justifiable national-security cases are built into the law. Yet even for matters that don’t need opaqueness, bureaucrats have stonewalled information gatherers or ignored diktats from the Chief Information Commission (CIC), the judicial office that oversees RTI.

Consider my own experience. Researchers of defense policy like me need access to government data, but the Indian military does not adhere to declassification procedures. Frustrated by the lack of primary material related to the defense ministry’s organizational structure from the 1940s to 1980s, I filed an RTI request in 2009 against the Ministry of Defence and the three armed services, seeking six documents. A torturous year shuttling between different offices later I finally appealed to the CIC in August last year. But I heard from the CIC only eight months later. This exposed the first loophole in the implementation of the RTI—the CIC can take as long as it wants to call for the first hearing.

The course of my hearings threw up more surprises. Admitting it had one of the documents in question, the army claimed that it was still sensitive to national security and could not be declassified. Anticipating this I had made a caveat in my petition: that if there was any matter in these documents still sensitive then this could be redacted with a security deletion and the rest of the report could be shared. This information was anyway dated and secondary literature on it was already in the public domain. Something similar was done with a committee report that investigated the failures leading to the 1999 Kargil war in Kashmir.

But the army bureaucracy refused, instead offering to share the report with the CIC and leaving it to that office’s judgment. The CIC in turn refused to make the report public arguing that he could not “substitute my own judgement for that of the Army top brass.”

Mine isn’t the only example. Journalists Kuldip Nayar and Sandeep Unnithan,have both filed RTIs to get access to records relating to India’s 1962 war and 1971 war, respectively. In these cases, the CIC accepted the logic of declassification and instructed the relevant ministries to follow a logical and mature declassification policy. But these instructions went nowhere.

In other democracies, declassification is done by an expert body of scholars, historians and bureaucrats who deliberate and decide what to restrict and what to declassify. In India this process is missing. Bureaucrats who created the documents control their declassification. And they often are gripped by a fear of what will be revealed.

The RTI law in theory should signal to bureaucrats to start being accountable. Yet in practice, there is no political will from New Delhi to instruct bureaucracies to help ordinary citizens with information, or give them the manpower to do so. In this environment, bureaucrats can easily avoid this law.

These episodes suggest that the RTI act needs to be bolstered. First, the staff strength of the CIC needs to be augmented. Second the powers of that body must be strengthened. CIC officials should be allowed to initiate contempt proceedings against bureaucrats that do not implement its orders. In my case, at least the CIC advocated declassification at first. Third, all RTI requests and information gleaned through them must be shared on the Internet. Finally, the CIC must hear from experts during its deliberations. It cannot argue, as it did in my case, that one cannot substitute for the judgment of the military. Without such modifications, the obvious loss is for democratic accountability.

This legal issue can have profound implications for India’s democracy. Without access to government documents, academics—especially historians—can only compose hagiographies of leaders or one-sided views of political events. The government denies citizens greater understanding about big events such as India’s 1962 war against China, and may unfortunately skew their views. It’s time to lift the veil of secrecy.

Mr. Mukherjee is a research fellow at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis (IDSA), New Delhi.

Let’s say you’re walking around your neighborhood, or a neighborhood you’d like to make yours, and you spy a house you find interesting. Even if it isn’t for sale, you can just whip out your iPhone, take a picture of the home and in less than a minute, you’ll have an estimate of its price, plus details on its square footage, number of rooms, similar homes for sale and other facts.

A new iPhone app called HomeSnap can tell you the estimated value of any home just by pointing the phone at it and taking a picture. It even gives you the ratings of local schools or info on similar homes for sale. WSJ’s Walt Mossberg gives it a try.

This feat of digital magic, which works all over the country, is performed by a new, free app called HomeSnap, from a Washington, D.C., online real-estate firm, Sawbuck Realty. Despite its parentage, the company says that using the app doesn’t send any data to a Realtor, or invite any calls or emails from one—unless you explicitly ask for such a connection. It’s just a cool way to investigate houses and if you like, to share your “Snaps”—photo profiles of houses—with HomeSnap users and friends via email, text or social networks.

Why would you want to use it? Maybe you’re interested in buying the house if it ever comes on the market, or helping a friend do so. Or, maybe you’re just curious, or nosy. Of course, you could be in real house-hunting mode, and HomeSnap gives you even more information if the house you took a picture of is for sale, including interior photos and bid history. There’s even the option of contacting a buyer’s agent, asking a question or requesting a tour—right from the phone.

You can use the app to flip through Snaps taken by others, either in nearby areas or around the nation. (HomeSnap allows you to keep your own Snaps out of this “stream,” if you’d rather your neighbors don’t know you’ve been investigating their homes or you’d rather not tip off potential competing buyers.)

With a picture you take of a home, HomeSnap offers data like the bedrooms and baths it has.

There are many real-estate apps and websites, such as Zillow, that allow you to get similar information. Some real-estate firms have their own. But these typically require you to type in an address, or troll through a list, or study a map and tap on a marker that represents a house of interest. All HomeSnap requires is that you snap the shutter on your iPhone. (Android and iPad versions are in the works.)

I’ve been testing HomeSnap for a few weeks in two states: Maryland and Rhode Island. In my 17 attempts, the app almost always correctly identified the house I was shooting. In two cases, both in town-house complexes, it wasn’t sure and presented me with an aerial photo displaying a few guesses from which I could pick. In two other cases, it couldn’t identify the house at all for some reason.

The app doesn’t actually perform photo recognition on the house. Instead, it uses the iPhone’s GPS capability and its sensors to identify the house and then fetches the details from a server in the cloud.

HomeSnap includes a Stealth mode that lets you take a picture when you aren’t right in front of a house—even when you’re inside another nearby house—and get an aerial view of homes in the area from which you can choose a property as your Snap. This proved accurate for me. In one test, it worked perfectly when I was only able to shoot the rear of a house.

Sawbuck says it built the app partly because it hopes that if a user likes it, he or she will one day use one of its agents. But it says so far only about 10% of the 150,000 Snaps taken with the app have been of homes that are actually for sale.

You can flip through Snaps by others, either nearby or around the nation.

If a home isn’t for sale, HomeSnap draws its information from public information like tax records, school boundaries, and census data. If a home is for sale, it provides much more detailed information drawn from local listing databases.

I found HomeSnap fun and impressive. It’s a good tool for investigating possible purchases, learning the estimated value of a house and getting other important information. For example, each Snap includes scores from third-party data vendors that rate the quality of nearby schools and rate the relative appreciation and investment value of a home, over 10 years, compared with the average. Some Snaps reveal previous sale dates and prices.

But its information wasn’t always complete or accurate. For instance, in the case of my own home, which isn’t on the market, it got the number of bathrooms wrong, and didn’t know the number of bedrooms—an omission the company blames on a quirk in the public records available for my area. (My tests elsewhere did include the number of bedrooms.) The app has a feature that allows you to report such errors.

In addition, the app currently doesn’t have extra information drawn from listings of homes for rent and can’t pinpoint units inside large buildings. The company says it’s working on both capabilities.

It marks photos of certain homes with a color-coded banner—green if the home is for sale; orange if it’s under contract; and purple if there’s an coming open house for the property. If there’s a major change in the information on a Snap in your history, the app updates it.

The app keeps a history of your Snaps and the company retains them on its servers, whether or not you choose to make them public. In its licensing terms, the company reserves the right to reuse, or modify, the photos you take, though it promises not to “materially” change them, or to distribute or reproduce photos taken by those who opt to keep them private.

If you’re looking for a house or just curious about one and you own an iPhone, HomeSnap is a clever, useful and entertaining tool.

Write to Walter S. Mossberg at walt.mossberg@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared May 9, 2012, on page D1 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: A Real-Estate App When You’re Buying Or Just Nosy.

By SHALINI RAMACHANDRAN

Commercial-free prime-time shows—the Holy Grail of TV watchers—has come to Dish Network Corp.

And it’s likely to wreak holy havoc.

Dish Network released a DVR feature that can automatically skip commercials from nationally broadcast prime-time shows, a move that threatens billions of dollars in broadcast-television advertising. Shalini Ramachandran has details on digits. Photo: Getty Images.

On Thursday, the satellite-TV operator began offering its customers a DVR feature that allows viewers to completely avoid commercials—rather than just fast-forward through ads, as the old model digital-video recorders do.

The new “Auto Hop” feature comes on a DVR dubbed the “Hopper,” a device that has been available to subscribers since March. With Auto Hop, viewers see a black screen momentarily where the ads were broadcast, or a glimpse of the first frame of the first commercial. Then the show resumes. Consumers merely have to click an on-screen Auto Hop button before a show to enable the feature.

“You can put down your remote control” and not see an ad again for the entire show, said Vivek Khemka, vice president of Dish product management.

The “Hopper” DVR costs Dish subscribers $10 a month in addition to a $99 upfront fee. Dish also offers a less-expensive traditional DVR with no upfront charge and a $6 monthly fee. The “Hopper” is made by Echostar Corp.,

which like Dish is controlled by satellite-TV pioneer Charlie Ergen.

The notion that viewers won’t see even a whirr of fast-forwarded ads threatens billions of dollars in broadcast television advertising—and risks the ire of the networks.

“There has been a problem with ad skipping and this is just making it worse,” said Tracey Scheppach, innovations director at Starcom MediaVest, a media-buying firm owned by Publicis Groupe SA.

The feature is available on recordings of nationally broadcast prime-time programs aired on Walt Disney

Co’s ABC, CBS

Corp’s CBS, News Corp.‘s

Fox and Comcast

Corp’s NBC but watched after 1 a.m. the day after they air. Dish is the third biggest pay-TV distributor, with more than 14 million subscribers, trailing Comcast and DirecTV

.

None of the broadcast networks affected had any immediate comment. News Corp. owns The Wall Street Journal.

Dish’s move is likely to heighten tensions between TV network owners and pay-TV distributors—cable and satellite operators and phone companies. Relations are already strained because of rising programming costs. Broadcasters have been pushing to get a larger share of “retransmission fees,” paid by the service providers that pipe or beam programming into homes. Traditionally, retransmission fees were paid almost entirely to cable channels, not broadcast networks.

Dish Chief Executive Joe Clayton in an interview acknowledged the tension over retransmission fees. “But that’s a separate issue,” he said. “The Auto Hop feature is all about the consumer.”

Mr. Clayton trumpeted the new feature. “This has been the Holy Grail of television viewers for 40 years,” he said. Dish didn’t provide definitive numbers on how many customers have opted to get the Hopper, but Mr. Clayton said it’s a “big number.”

“What’s wrong with giving the consumer what he wants?That’s my response to anybody who takes issue with this,” Mr. Clayton said.

Introduction of DVRs several years ago raised widespread concerns about the impact on TV advertising. The impact so far has been mixed. The devices have been widely adopted and are now in about 43% of U.S. households, according to Nielsen. Media buyers say about 50% of ads get skipped by DVR users.

Yet TV advertising has increased from $51.6 billion in 2003, when DVRs became widely available, to $58 billion in 2011, according to Publicis Groupe SA’s Zenith Optimedia

Marketers say TV is still a crucial medium for advertising, given its broad reach. Nielsen has developed ratings measures that track how many people watch ads that appear during programs up to three days after it airs, which is reflected in ad deals.

Still, DVRs have changed marketing tactics. Advertisers have worked overtime to embed their products and pitches within the shows. Product placement over the past few years has soared and become a major part of most media companies’ offering to advertisers.

Dish makes clear that it isn’t deleting the advertising from the recorded material; if customers want to watch all the ads, they can. “We spend hundreds of millions on advertising per year,” Dish’s Mr. Khemka said. “I don’t think it makes a very big difference from our perspective to the advertising market.”

Unlike cable channels, broadcasters earn relatively little in subscription fees. Advertising accounts for the vast majority of broadcast networks’ revenue. CBS, for instance, collected $209 million in subscription fee revenue in 2011, compared with $4.9 billion in ad revenue, according to market researcher SNL Kagan.

Now, broadcasters are pushing for higher retransmission fees to bolster revenue. But pay-TV executives are balking at the costs—and are following a legal battle that could give them more leverage in their negotiations.

Pay-TV distributors, including Dish and DirecTV, have said they are closely watching litigation between broadcasters and Aereo Inc., an online video-streaming service that offers broadcast network signals for New York residents. Aereo, which is backed by media veteran Barry Diller among others, has been sued by broadcasters claiming copyright infringement.

“If it is found to be legal, not paying retransmission consent, it’s a very interesting thing,” Time Warner Cable Chief Executive Glenn Britt said on a recent conference call. Derek Chang, who oversees programming negotiations for DirecTV, said in an interview the case “could impact some of the dialogue going forward.”

—Merissa Marr

and Suzanne Vranica contributed to this article.

Write to Shalini Ramachandran at shalini.ramachandran@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared May 10, 2012, on page B1 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Zap! New DVR Wipes Out Ads.