Inefficiency leads to success

[karira]

As reported in deccanchronicle.com on 28 October 2008:
City News

Inefficiency leads to success

Hyderabad, Oct. 27: The "performance" of the State Information Commission depends on the "non-performance" of the Public Information Officers. For every unsatisfactory answer that the PIOs provide to an applicant, a petition is filed at the respective department.

This usually elicits another unsatisfactory answer and the applicant then inevitably files a petition at the commission. Along with this, the commission also gets general complaints which can be lodged under Section 18(1). Thanks to the inefficiency of PIO’s, the commission got 31,964 applications in 2007, while it got only 8,864 applications in the first year of its functioning.

Most PIOs provide incomplete or vague answers to questions of applicants and sometimes no answers at all. And the officials of the commission do not seem to be too unhappy at this. If PIOs get very efficient there will be no raison d’etre for the existence of the commission. When asked about this, one Information Commissioner quipped: "If all information is provided, we would be left with no applications. Complainants who fail to get relevant answers from the PIOs approach us." Significantly, there is a provision to penalise PIOs for not providing the correct and required information.

As per rules, they can be asked to pay a significant amount as fine for not giving relevant details. But this is rarely done. When an applicant queried the commission on how many PIOs had been acted against for such omissions, it replied that action was taken against only one PIO so far. Obviously, the commission does not want the PIOs to get too efficient.





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[sandeepbaheti]

Sponsorer

The media has taken a childish view of the matter and this report shows complete lack of reasoning. The success of Police forces cannot be judged merely by an increase in number of convicts and success of judiciary cannot be evaluated by the number of cases filed.
Similarly, the large number of appeals pending with CIC/SICs is anything but a success.

Most PIOs provide incomplete or vague answers to questions of applicants and sometimes no answers at all.

Firstly, the media has failed to understand the difference between question/answer and information. Secondly, had this media company been a public authority I would have filed an RTI application to them asking how many PIOs they came across and how many of them provide incomplete or vague "answers" before they used the word "most" in their statement.

[taurus]

I agree with Mr. Sandeepbaheti. The report lacks depth and proper appreciation of the RTI. Vague and generalised statements do not help.