Live
Law: New Delhi: Wednesday, 25 November 2015.
It refers to
139-page CIC-verdict dated 19.11.2015 in petition-numbers CIC/CC/A/2014/001053
etc disposing 3588 petitions of a retired IAF officer against different
public-authorities where the petitioner hinted more his regular petitions
pouring at CIC. Chief Information Commissioner while giving required relief
under eight points in para 37 of the verdict, directed in para 38 of the
verdict his own registry to with the objective of putting in place a system for
handling RTI applications that appear to be vexatious in nature and scope.
It is
surprising why and how Chief Information Commissioner could direct his own
registry to place the matter before himself rather than himself spelling out in
the verdict himself, a system for handling RTI applications that appear to be
vexatious! It seems that present Chief Information Commissioner kept
departments having such large number of pending petitions of individual
petitioners with himself just for increasing his disposal rate in his short
tenure.
Remedy to
tackle such situation of large number of petitions relating to grievances lies
in:
1.
Immediate legislation of‘Right-To-Services &
Grievances Bill 2014’
2.
A system like ‘Lok Adalat’ should be formulated at CIC
where mass disposal of pending petitions can be done with help of experts. Even
Supreme Court has authenticated such a system with National Legal Services
Authority (NLSA) having organised these from Supreme Court to Taluk Courts.
3.
RTI-fees should be raised to rupees fifty with first
twenty copied pages free-of-cost, but with such fees being uniform for all
public-authorities and states as repeatedly advised by DoPT circulars. It will
check repeated petitions being filed on single aspect apart from checking
misuse of the transparency-Act and saving man-hours and postal-expenses of both
the public-authorities and petitioners without burdening genuine petitioners
who will be getting service worth rupees fifty as at present in form of
free-of-cost twenty copied pages of documents.
4.
Time-bound decision at CIC with maximum one week for
single-bench verdicts and one month for full-bench verdicts after completion of
hearing
5.
Time of CIC-officers must not be wasted with all of them
over-occupied for several months in preparation of annual CIC-convention, like
happened this year when about 10000 incoming mail-envelopes could not be opened
for two months with admitted this very reason, better option being abolition of
system of CIC-convention!