Times of India: Gurgaon: Sunday, July 20, 2014.
Activist
Aseem Takyar said on Saturday his RTI plea was rejected by the CIC despite the
fact that it concerned human rights and discrimination, and not security as it
was made out to be.
Speaking to
TOI, Takyar said he had sought information from the Prime Minister's Office on
June 7, 2013, about whether "after the assassination of former Prime
Minister Indira Gandhi, any persons from a specific community/religion were
recruited in the SPG and whether it is a violation of human rights to recruit
personnel from a specific religion/community".
But the
commission saw no merit in the submissions made by Takyar and ordered that the
SPG is an exempted organization under Section 24 of the RTI Act. Takyar had
argued that Section 24 was not applicable as the information he was seeking
related to human rights violation.
Takyar said
that he has filed over 6,000 RTI applications in the past six years but the
authorities had not replied to more than 500 queries. One such application was
on expenditure on SPG security to Congress president Sonia Gandhi and
vice-president Rahul Gandhi but the commission did not provide a reply to it
either, he said.