RTI Act: committee mulls scrapping of fee

[dssampath]

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Pl. visit the following page which is a news item reported on to-days The Hindu - Madurai Edition.

The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Madurai News : RTI Act: committee mulls scrapping of fee

[sidmis]

[Below is the full text of News Item posted by S.Sampath above]

RTI Act: committee mulls scrapping of fee
as reported in The Hindu, Sep 28, 2008

MADURAI: Government departments have been asked to host on the
websites all the information relating to schemes and procedures for
the people to get benefits under them and to ensure transparent
governance, E.M. Sudarsana Natchiappan, Chairman of the Parliamentary
Standing Committee on Law and Justice, said on Saturday.

Addressing a one-day seminar on the Right to Information Act and its
implementation, he said the committee was visualising a situation in
which no application under the Act was received for want of
information.

All government departments and public sector undertakings, including
the judiciary and legislature, were accountable for using the
taxpayers' money. "Except for the reasoning behind the judgments, all
aspects of the judiciary administration should be made transparent,"
he said.

Petitions for information from various departments had been flooding
in the past two years, and the Central Information Commission had
disposed of 16,000 applications and another 8,000 were to be cleared,
Dr. Natchiappan said. "It is a teething problem that so much of
information is being sought by the public. The officials should
complain of short of manpower in giving replies to the people," he
said. As the system became more transparent, the number of
applications would come down. "The Act is complimentary to our
administration," he said. United Progressive Alliance chairperson
Sonia Gandhi had described the Act as a tool to empower the poor.

On fee and rejection
Pointing to the complaints that many applications had been rejected
just because the initial fee had not been paid, Dr. Natchiappan said
it was unfortunate that in some cases "government departments had
spent up to Rs. 10,000 on lawyer fees to contest cases relating to the
petitioners' failure to pay Rs. 10 in fee. We have advised the heads
of Union Government departments and the public sector undertakings not
to insist on the fee while receiving the applications, but only while
giving the replies, depending on the number of photocopies to be
taken." The committee was considering scrapping of the initial fee, he
said.

Joint Registrar Pankaj K.P. Shreyaskar recalled how the Act had helped
the people have access to food, health and other facilities in rural
Karnataka.

The government should allocate more funds to popularise the Act, said
P. Duraisingam, chairman of the Federation of Consumer
Organisations–Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry. Consumer Research,
Education, Action, Training and Empowerment and Indian Institute of
Public Administration, New Delhi, along with FEDCOT organised the
seminar.


KNOW YOUR RIGHTS: Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Law and Justice E. M. Sudarsana Natchiappan, left, releasing a handbook on Right to Information Act. Joint Registrar Pankaj K.P. Shreyaskar receives the first copy, in the city on Saturday

The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Madurai News : RTI Act: committee mulls scrapping of fee