As reported by Tribune News Service on 6th January 2008 on : The Tribune, Chandigarh, India - Chandigarh Stories RTI Act only on paper: Survey
Chandigarh, January 5
Not a single public authority in Chandigarh has displayed in its office the 17 proactive disclosures which are a must under the Right to Information (
RTI) Act.
Required to be physically displayed at all offices within 120 days of the passing of
RTI Act on October 12, 2005, the disclosures under Section 4 I (b) are yet to happen. The situation is such that even the office of the UT administrator doesn’t have these disclosures or even a formal system of receipt of
RTI applications.
That’s what came out of a three-week-long field inspection of the
RTI implementation status in 70 offices of the UT administration and the Central Government in Chandigarh. Conducted by 14 law students from Rajiv Gandhi National University of Law, Patiala, the assessment reflected a miserable state of
RTI in the city.
In over 76 per cent cases, even the
RTI application was not accepted. In more than half of the cases, public information officers (
PIO) were not accessible. Average time for which an applicant had to wait in a public office to submit the application and ask basic questions about PIOs and proactive disclosures was over 34 minutes - 120 minutes in the office of the UT administrator and Punjab Raj Bhavan put together. In 90 per cent cases, employees either did not know who the
PIO was or said he was on leave.
Part of “Mission Zero Tolerance,” a citizens’ initiative for corruption-free society launched today by the Burning Brain Society, the survey documents the field inspection procedure students followed, and makes a case for improvement of the
RTI in Chandigarh.
The petitioners have already posted to chief information commissioners, Central Information Commission, some 55 applications against the erring public officers of Chandigarh. Sent under Section 18 of the
RTI Act, these list the public offices where
RTI applications were not even received.
For the researchers, the strangest experience was the one at UT administrator’s office, which directed them to Punjab Raj Bhawan. At Raj Bhawan, they were not shown Section 4 information; their
RTI applications were not accepted; when they insisted they were told the application would be treated as a “private” letter.
The Burning Brain Society, which did quantitative and qualitative analysis of
RTI disclosures of 70 government departments of Chandigarh, further found that except for one department, the others had incomplete or irrelevant disclosures. Not just this, information under section 4(1) of the
RTI Act available on offices’ websites was outdated, often as old as two years. Most of this information has not been updated since the
RTI’s inception in 2005.
In their
RTI applications, the researchers asked questions about whether the public authorities were following the Public Records Act and the Central Secretariat Manual of Official Procedures which require proper maintenance of records (written and electronic) and even destruction of it. Even the sent and received e-mails have to recorded. Hemant Goswami, chairperson, Burning Brain Society, said the initiative sought to end the unaccounted discretion exercised at various levels of bureaucracy in the city.