Times of India: Nagpur: Sunday, March 25, 2018.
A former Road
Transport Office (RTO) inspector is running pillar to post for receiving his
own documents under Right to Information (RTI) Act since over a decade.
About 10,400
documents of properties and holdings were allegedly taken from Vilas Lohote’s
home during a raid by Anti-corruption Bureau (ACB) in 2001, following a
complaint of corruption against him. Of those, only 2,348 documents were
attached to the charge sheet filed by the ACB, while it failed to inform or
return about remaining 8,052 papers. He subsequently applied for getting this
remaining lot under the RTI Act.
Denying his
claims, ACB officials, on the condition of anonymity, told TOI that their
former superintendent had submitted an affidavit with the State Information
Commission (SIC) claiming only 2,535 papers were confiscated during the raid.
The complainant should provide the receipt which must have been given to him
during the seizure of documents to prove his claims.
Lohote,
however, dismissed ACB’s claims stating that even SIC commissioner Vilas Patil,
while deciding his appeal for getting back documents, had directed the ACB to
provide him photocopies of his remaining 8,052 documents.
“The first
RTI query was filed by me in 2007. At that time, the ACB admitted that it had
those documents, but it failed to hand them over. Subsequently, I applied to
the appellate authority and SIC, which directed the ACB to return my
documents,” Lohote told TOI.
However, the
ACB failed to comply with SIC’s directives for a long time, forcing the
appellant to send them many reminders. “In 2011, however, the ACB submitted an
affidavit with the SIC that it doesn’t have those papers. However, I came to
know about this fact only in November last year when the case was disposed of,”
he said.
The ex-RTO
inspector also claimed that the ACB handed over 530 documents to the Income Tax
department from the 2,348 documents which were later used to impose tax on his
entire family. “The documents handed over to the I-T department are unreadable
as they are photocopies. Still, they are using them to levy us with taxes
running into crores of rupees on my family members,” he said.
Lohote also
applied to Central Information Commission (CIC) for getting back his documents
from the I-T department under the RTI Act. Though it handed him over some
documents after CIC’s orders of May 17, 2013, to the commissioner of Income Tax
(East)-II, Nagpur, those were actually photocopies and were unreadable. He
subsequently returned them to the department.
“I’ve sent as
many as 12 reminders to the I-T department in the last four years about the
CIC’s order, but they failed to reply. Both, the ACB and I-T department, have
made a mockery of the RTI Act by not adhering to the directives of SIC and CIC.
I want those documents to actually know the basis on which the charges were
framed against our family,” he said.
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