Mystery of the missing file

[sidmis]

Mystery of the missing file
as reported by SUKHADA TATKE |12 Sep 2008|TNN

All's not well with the way the Sunshine Act is working in Mumbai; the Right To Information Act, supposed to be the magic wand that can get things working in an inefficient and apathetic bureaucracy , has needed help from the Maharashtra State Human Rights Commission to be effective in a neighbourhood battle between an Andheri housing society and some tenants.

But Mohammad Afzal did not know all this when he filed an RTI application with the BMC, seeking to know whether the health club that was coming up inside the society had all the permissions . What prompted the RTI query was a directive from the Deepti Shakti Mukti Housing Society, asking all tenants to pay the health club's fees even if they were not using its facilities. So Afzal filed his first RTI query in August 2006 with the BMC's building proposals department at Bandra. "Does the housing society have the required permission from all the authorities concerned to run the club? How many times have society members approached the authorities for permission ? Can you provide a plan of the building?'' were some of the questions that the RTI plea asked.

"The Public Information Officer (PIO) of the building proposals department asked me to provide the plot number as well as the city survey number (called 'CTS' ) of the housing complex. I submitted both of them immediately. But, after that, I failed to hear from the department,'' Afzal told TOI.

"They evaded me every time I went there and finally said the relevant files were missing,'' he added. So, 58 days after he filed the first RTI plea, Afzal filed an appeal with the relevant appellate authority in the BMC.

"But, in the hearing , the BMC PIO said he had found the 'missing ' file and that I could collect it from him the next day after paying the charges,'' Afzal said.

But, somehow, the file was again missing the next day. "They simply told me that the file had again gone missing,'' Afzal said. So he filed an appeal with the State Information Commission. The BMC official was called for the hearing - it was already July 2008, about two years after he had filed the first RTI query - and the same farce unfolded all over again. Yes, the file had been located; and would Afzal be kind enough to come and collect the file "the next day''?

Afzal again went to the BMC building proposals department and, again, he was told that the file had vanished. The 45-year-old then took up the case with the Maharashtra State Human Rights Commission, detailing the type of stonewalling that he had to put up with. But even he was not prepared for what followed. He got a call from the BMC office the very next day; the file had finally been located and would be handed over to him if he could drop in at the office. The surprises did not end there. The BMC on its own invited Afzal to inspect the documents when he visited its Bandra office the next day and the file revealed that the health club was not mentioned at all in the building plan. But the war may not have been won.

The BMC has not said anything about what it plans to do with the illegal health club. BMC PIO V L Joshi was also not very apologetic about the two-year not-so-merry-go-round that Afzal had to go through. "It was he who delayed giving us the relevant information about the plot of land,'' he insisted.

THE BACKLOG

• 16,500 cases are pending in the State Information Commission.
• 10,000 cases have been disposed of from March 2006 to August 2008.
• Each information commissioner hears 700-1000 appeals every year.
• Each Bombay High Court hears about 2,500 cases annually.

Mystery of the missing file-Mumbai-Cities-The Times of India