RTI queries up 8,000% since ’05….Rakesh Bhatnagar
Central Information Commission wants foolproof mechanism to make requisite information accessible to people
Central Information Commission wants foolproof mechanism to make requisite information accessible to people
Much before the Anna Hazare’s youth brigade hit the roads seeking a strong anti-graft law, ordinary people had started mounting pressure on the Prime Minister Office asking it about the fate of the Lokpal Bill that has been derailed by politicians quite a few times.
Using the Right to Information Act, commoners queries increased manifold and over all the RTI applicants surged by 8,000% since the Act came into effect in 2005.
Interestingly, petitioners expressed serious concerns over their parliamentary, legislative and municipal representatives becoming elusive after getting elected as lawmakers.
Even people from Amethi and Rae Bareli constituencies of Rahul Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi respectively had moved the CIC alleging that they couldn’t contact the MPs regarding certain problems in the constituency.
The CIC was, in turn, informed that since elected representatives aren’t entitled to secretariat services, they couldn’t respond to their electors’ grievances.
In a significant order two years ago, the CIC sought to relieve the citizens by directing all the secretariats of parliament, assemblies and civic bodies to accept aggrieved people’s applications and inform them about their queries addressed to their representatives.
However, the authorities concerned haven’t set up requisite support mechanism to comply with this ruling.
Before delivering this judgment, the commission had consulted legal experts, who examined whether an elected representative is a lawmaker under the RTI, though he is under the criminal law.
Accepting the legal experts’ opinions, the commission said MPs, MLAs, councillors or members of panchayats “cannot in themselves be deemed public authorities”. It hastened to add that nevertheless, organisations and committees set up under the Constitution are indeed public authorities. Thus, their activities are “deemed accessible to the citizenry under the RTI”.
It’s necessary for such organisations to develop systems for making requisite information accessible to people, it added.
The simplest way of doing so, the CIC says, is to strengthen section 4 of the RTI Act, empowering the already appointed public information officers to “maintain all its records duly catalogued and indexed facilitating the right to information and
and connected through a network all over the country on different systems so that access to such records is facilitated”.
Thus any information that ordinarily lies with the government could also be had through MPs, MLAs, councillors and members of panchayat.