News18: New Delhi: Wednesday, May 24, 2017.
How many RTI
replies do you expect to get when you want to know about the total fees
collected by the private schools in Delhi, and how they spent this money?
Anything, but not 1,435.
But this is
what you have to go through if the Delhi government has its way. The
government’s Directorate of Education (DoE) has resorted to a mindboggling
course when it was asked questions under the Right to Information (RTI) Act
about the income and expenditure of the private schools in Delhi.
A set of
straight RTI questions on whether the DoE has the accounts of private schools
regarding their income and expenditure would be first forwarded to 11 District
education Officers, who in turn will send it to 23 Zonal Education Officers.
What happens next is baffling they forward it to 1400 private schools for
directly sending replies to the RTI applicant.
So one
application is processed by at least 1,435 individual authorities and based on
how they reply, you will be compelled to file as many appeals. The exercise
thus is not just exhaustive but eventually it will make sure you never have
full details of what private schools actually earn and how they spend the
money.
Shikha Bagga,
secretary of NGO ‘Justice for All’, has now dragged the government to the Delhi
High Court over what she called an attempt to frustrate the objective of the
RTI Act. Bagga, through her lawyer Khagesh Jha, pointed out that there was no
provision in the transparency law to transfer an application to different
officers in the same public authority and therefore it was illegal to move her
application to District and Zonal Education officers in the DoE.
“The
respondent (DoE) is duty-bound to provide the requisite information to the
petitioner under Right to Information Act, 2005, but either he has
misinterpreted the Act or deliberately has been misguiding the people seeking
information with his malpractices and the malafide intention for not providing
the information, thereby defeating the purpose of the RTI Act, 2005,” stated
the petitioner.
Advocate Jha
asserted that the DoE was obligated to have information about the fees
collected by the private schools and their expenditure, apart from furnishing
information about auditing the accounts of these institutions as per the HC
order.
Accepting the
submissions, a HC bench of Justice Sanjeev Sachdeva questioned the modus
operandi of the DoE and directed it to come clear whether it has the requisite
information or not. The judge issued a notice to the DoE and sought its
response by Wednesday on whether it has collected such information or not.