Times of India: Chennai: Monday,
September 26, 2016.
In what can
be called a rare order of penalizing under the RTI Act, the State Information
Commission (SIC) in a recent order has fined a former Ambattur sub-registrar
25,000 for failing to send proper replies to an RTI petition. The SIC has also
directed the inspector general (IG), registration to initiate disciplinary
action against the sub-registrar.
The officer
in question is K Vijayalakshmi who is now posted as the district registrar,
Tiruvannamalai.
In his RTI
petitions filed in July and September 2014, SR Venkatraman, of Varadarajapuram
in Ambattur, claimed to have obtained a stay order against registration of any
transaction on his land, which, he said, was communicated to the district
registrar. Despite that, a registration was carried out in December 2013. Using
RTI, he sought to know the action taken on his intimation of the stay order and
request for cancellation of the registration.
He received a
reply in November, 2014 from the Public Information Officer that there was no
record of the stay order in question.
After this,
he filed two appeals with the SIC. During the enquiry, Vijayalakshmi submitted
that she had received a letter from Venkatraman's lawyer, but the stay order
was not there in it. She also said she had arranged to send a reply to the RTI
through her assistant.
The
information commissioner, K Ramanujam ruled that her explanations were not
corroborated by any evidence. "There is no record either to show that she
handed over the RTI file to her successor to enable him to send a reply,"
Ramanujam noted in the order.
During the
enquiry, Ramanujam also sought to check the registers in the Ambattur
sub-registrar's office and noted that it was maintained in an improper manner.
"This will negate the ideal of accountability which is a corner-stone of
RTI Act. It is suggested that IG, registration may issue suitable instructions
to all officers on this," he noted.
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