Question: What if the required info is very difficult to take out by the PIO

[gaurav_bandi]

What happens when an RTI application is filled with the Court or the Police and they do not maintain their records in such a manner that can take out the said information. i.e. if we ask the courts "how many women have been convicted in a particular year" then i guess they may not have such a record with them.

What happens in such a situation ??

regards

[karira]

In such cases the information is likely to be denied, because, as per Sec 7(9):

9. An information shall ordinarily be provided in the form in which it is sought unless it would disproportionately divert the resources of the public authority or would be detrimental to the safety or preservation of the record in question.

Having said that, there are several orders of CIC stating that if information has to be compiled, it does not mean that it should be ordinarily denied.

Unless you are absolutely sure that information you require is not maintained by the Public Authority, why don't you at least make an attempt to find out by filing a RTI application ? If the information sought is in "larger public interest", you might be able to convince the Public Authority to compile that information.

Please read the following threads:

What does information means under RTI?

Cost of providing information?

Information can be disclosed in phases....

The Costing of information

[murgie]

Even a quick look at the thread links listed in Karira's last post is very useful. I had assumed (contrary to the decision posted in The Costing of information (#6) by Ganpat1956), Decision on Appeal No. 23/IC(A)/2006 F.No. 11/85/2006/CIC dt 10.04.2006) that PAs could claim the imputed cost of salary and wages of personnel put on the job. In a hearing before the CIC against RBI this came up and I only attempted to show that the effort was actually negligible ... since the data is in a standard database format, etc. But this decision of the CIC says "In any case, there is no provision in the RTI Act to collect and recover from the information seekers the imputed cost i.e. the average salary and wages of the staff deployed for compiling and providing the information, as they are on the payroll of the public authority which is under obligation to provide information." But it does show that my IC (Tiwari) was also as unaware of this ruling as I was.

Another practical problem also came up in my request to RBI, and I wonder if others have had a similar experience and found some way to overcome this. The RBI CPIO and AA are very senior (i.e. quite obviously computer-illiterate) folks who took the tack (in writing, in their rulings, with complete frankness) that as the matter was so technical they had no choice but to rely on the advice of their techies. And RBI's techies are all work-challenged! The matter has since been remanded to RBI, and in connection with this point, all I have been able to state in my fresh submission is: "Please do not listen only to your techies. Listen to my database experts too. At least give me a chance to question your techies in your presence. ... I will even get someone to show you how to use the 'translate/replace' function in dBase/Oracle."

I'm only an academic economist by training, and while I work with large databases and some statistical software, I am not a database person myself. But I still tried my best non-technical explanation for a computer problem the techies mentioned at the CIC hearing (where RBI was represented by 4 techies who did all the talking, besides the CPIO and 2 legal sideys) -- that a "data dictionary is unavailable." I told the RBI CPIO in my fresh resubmission that this amounts to saying that for a data table used by RBI (central bank of the 10th largest economy in the world) in preparing a statutory report, their techies do not know which columns represent which variables. What the final outcome will be in this case I do not know.

I tried learning from some threads on this site discussing "File not traceable" as a common excuse by PAs, and adapting that to my case involving computer records either lost or transformed so as to become irretrievable (if the RBI techies were in fact telling the truth about their inability).

How does one overcome the excuse, at least loosely related to s7(9) -- "We are stupid. What to do. India's Constitution allows a man to be an idiot. Sorry we don't know how to help." The RTI Act does not impose any requirement of minimal competence on PAs, so PAs happily admit to less than that. Best,

Murgie

[colnrkurup]

For any honest and straight forward PIO, it is too easy to reply that " The information sought is not readily held by the public authority. Though with much effort the information can be gathered, this ofice is not in a position to provide the same as it would disproportionately divert the resources of the public authority as stipulated in Section 7(9) of the RTI Act"

I don't think anyone would be able to dispute this calaim as it is gospel truth

[nk agarwal]

Under the circumstances what can a information seeker do?
This is becoming increasingly true. PIO's are holding "unpleasant" info and escaping on these pretext.
thnks
nk agarwal

[nk agarwal]

Use provisions provided under RTI Act-2005.
Your options are Ist Appeal to departmental Authority (state or Central etc.) and the 2nd appeal to CIC or SIC.
nk agarwal

[murgie]

Originally Posted by nk agarwal

Under the circumstances what can a information seeker do?
This is becoming increasingly true. PIO's are holding "unpleasant" info and escaping on these pretext.
thnks
nk agarwal

Overcoming a PIO's use of s7(9) is not easy but I think all of us need to try harder. One potential route is to use a multiple-RTI request approach, first asking only for information that ought to be readily available under s4(1)b(v). At least in a couple of instances where I've been involved (relating to requests from SEBI and RBI) the potential cost to the PA seems large only because absolutely no attention has been paid to fulfilling its obligations under s4.

It will need some luck, I admit, to make this connection between s4 and s7(9) stick, so that an SIC or CIC will allow a PA to invoke s7(9) only if it has substantially met its obligations u/s4. It takes a lot of separate efforts to get one success. But if we get to even one clear case of such a connection drawn by an SIC/CIC, that will give us all a powerful precedent.