Economic Times: New Delhi: Wednesday, June 07, 2017.
It’s time for
government departments to account for their feline residents, among other
lapses. Exasperated with repeated cases of files lost and information denied, the
Central Information Commission has directed the government to find a way to
protect government records and recreate them if they are lost.
In a detailed
judgement, CIC said that some departments get an allowance to keep cats but
even then over the past 11 years of implementation of the Right to Information
Act the number of cases of files getting lost and information denied under the
Act have been increasing.
Information
Commissioner M Sridhar Acharyulu said that frequent reference to “missing files”
is really an “excuse to deny the information” and is a major threat to
“transparency, accountability and the also major reason for violation of RTI
Act”.
Millions of
RTI applications might have been rejected by PIOs (public information officers) on this ground
during the last 11 years of RTI regime. With ‘missing files excuse’ being around,
it will be futile to talk about implementation of RTI Act… Most surprisingly,
while using this excuse profusely, no public authority made any effort to
address Acharyulu said in his order. The information commissioner directed the
Department of Personnel and Training to work out a proper system to prevent
loss of files and recreate files that have been lost.
He said that
the claim of missing files indicates deliberate destruction of records to “hide
corruption, fraud or immoral practices of public servants”.
He asked the
DoPT to develop comprehensive guidelines to handle the issue of missing files, through
better preservation and retrieval systems and see how alternative or shadow
files need to be built.
DoPT also
needs to take steps to prevent the phenomenon of missing of files and spell out
appropriate disciplinary or legal action to be taken in case of deliberate
destruction of records, the order said.
The
information commissioner asked the DoPT to borrow best practices from
Australia, New Zealand, Canada, US and UK archival systems. Acharyulu was
hearing a case filed by retired IAS officer Vijendra Singh Jafa, who had sought
copies of specific letters dating
back to 1995
on vigilance cases pending against him.
Despite the
retired officer giving specific file numbers and letter numbers, the social
justice and empowerment ministry could not furnish the records and the request
was transferred repeatedly from one desk to another.
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