The Right to Information
For BCAJ April, 2008
Narayan Varma
CIC’s decisions :
Schools, aided or otherwise, are covered under RTI :
In one interesting case,
the Central Information Commission, vide its order dated 18-5-2007, had
directed the Directorate of Education, GNCT of Delhi to obtain u/s.2(f) of the Act, the minutes of the Managing Committee
(MC) meetings from March 2002 to March 2007 from the Purna Prajna Public
School, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi and provide a copy to the appellant, Shri D. K.
Chopra. Subsequently, the ap-pellant informed the Commission that the PIO had
not complied with the above decision and when asked about it, the PIO stated
that he had no legal authority to obtain the information from the school.
The PIO at the hearing in
this adjunct matter reiterated that under the Delhi Education Act, the
documents which could be obtained are specified under Annexure-II in which the
document, namely, minutes of the meeting of the Managing Committee of schools
is not included. The Department of Education was therefore unable to acquire
the minutes of the Managing Committee from the concerned school as directed by
the Commission. Though an official of the respondent is a member of the MC, the
PIO has, however, no access to the minutes of MC.
In the decision, the Information Commissioner noted :
From the above decision,
one can conclude that schools, whether aided or otherwise, are covered under
the RTI Act.
(Shri D. K. Chopra v.
Directorate of Education, GNCT of
The RTI Act :
Chapter 4 of the Annual
Report 2005-06 as published by the Central Information Commission deals with
overview of implementation of the RTI Act, 2005.
It is a report u/s.25 of
the RTI Act on the implementation of the provisions of this Act during the year
2005-06 (for the period from
The implementation report
(IR) is made up of various charts and tables. It is interesting to note that in
many aspects, the Ministry of Finance tops the chart, some noted as under :
(Next is Ministry of Home Affairs Number of RTI request
received 1316 and rejected 377, percentage 28.65%)
This disproportionately
high ratio of rejection calls for introspection and training of the staff of
public authorities under this Ministry in disposing of the RTI requests.
Other News
Recently, the Delhi HC
strengthened the RTI law by interpreting its provisions. Justice S. Ravindra
Bhat said : a person who has been accused of
dowry demand by a woman or her parents is entitled to get information about the
details of income-tax returns filed by the complainant.
One Bhagat Singh, who had
been charged by his wife with demanding dowry, sought information about the
complainant’s tax returns to prove that the latter spent money on the wedding
from unknown sources or had concealed wealth. Any expenditure on marriage must
be listed and the source of wealth accounted for.
It is apparent that the
mere existence of an investigation process cannot be a ground for refusal of information.
The authority withholding information must show satisfactory reasons as to why
the release of such information would hamper the investigation process. Such
reasons should be germane, and the opinion of the process being hampered should
be reasonable and based on some material. Without this consideration, S. 8 and
other such provisions would become the haven for dodging demands for
information. Moreover, rights-based enactment is akin to a welfare measure and
it should be open to liberal interpretation. Otherwise a social act becomes
unsocial.
Given
The bigger problem is
that the bureaucracy has still not fully come to terms with the full import of
RTI, or if it has, then there have been attempts to ignore it. We have heard of
all kinds of impediments, from the silly to the sinister, that are put in the
way of the applicant. Then there are departments and ministries which find
various excuses to stay out of the ambit of the RTI Act; in one recent case
even the PMO was cagey about giving information on the disappearance of Subhas
Chandra Bose.
The year 2008 may ring in
Right to Information (RTI) on telephone as the Central Information Commission
(CIC) has a proposal to open a call centre in
In
The centre will also
intensify the campaign to train and sensitise designated Public Information
Officers on the RTI Act. Till now, only 10 percent of information officers and
other government officials have been trained. The officers are being trained in
Administrative Training Institutes in different states. These one-day to
three-day courses have been devised by Yashada in Pune, Centre for Good
Governance in
In this feature in
February 2008, a small news item was given on this fund. Now the Chief Minister
has conceded to get CM Relief Fund covered under the RTI Act. The disclosure
obtained under the RTI application has shocked the citizens of the State.
The fund, which lists
assisting people trapped in natural disasters as its sole objective, was
registered with the Charity Commissioner in 1967. The RTI query has now
revealed that a large part of the Rs.50 crore or thereabouts which the CM’s
office received in donations between 2003 and 2005 (when first Sushilkumar
Shinde and then Vilasrao Deshmukh were at the helm) went to events conducted by
institutions that were in no way related to calamities and disasters.
All details disclosed
show blatant misuse of funds.
Right from inception of
the RTI Act, there have been ongoing debates regarding powers of RTI
Information Commissioners v. the powers of the Court Judges. Now
conflicts have started between RTI Information Commissioners and the State
Legislative Assembly. Taking serious note of the issue of notices to the Vidhan
Sabha Principal Secretary by the UP Information Commission, the State Assembly
resolved that any such summons will be considered a violation of the privileges
of the House and necessary action will follow.
The decision of the House
comes in the wake of the issuance of two notices by the Commission to the
Principal Secretary R. P. Pandey on two petitions to the panel.
In both cases, the
Secretary had pleaded that the House was not covered under the Act. On this,
the applicants approached the State Information Commission, which in turn
issued notices to Pandey. Meanwhile, both matters had been referred to the
privileges committee, though one of the notices was later cancelled by the
Commission.
Ramanand Tiwari is
appointed as SIC stationed in Mumbai. It may be interesting to note that only
5% of SICs and CICs are non-bureaucrats, one of them is SIC for Pune division,
Vijay Kuwalekar, who is a senior journalist.
Commercial banks cannot
be compelled under the Right to Information (RTI) Act to divulge the operational
details of their ATMs installed across cities, the Central Information
Commission (CIC) has ruled. “Information pertaining to operation of ATMs is
really a matter of commercial confidence. As a matter of fact, a lot of
security is involved in such a procedure and such information cannot be given
to any outsider,” CIC’s Information Commissioner Padma Balasubramanian held in
a ruling on January 29.
According to information
obtained under the RTI Act, more than 800 farmers committed suicide in the
first six months of 2007.
The agrarian crisis has
forced 607 farmers to commit suicide in