Times of India: New Delhi: Sunday, April 29, 2018.
Almost a year
after it came out with draft RTI Rules 2017, the government seems to have put
them in cold storage. There has been criticism the new rules failed to address
recurrent issues like non-compliance of CIC orders and also gave more powers to
the chief information commissioner leaving scope for misuse.
The revised
rules, which had faced resistance, from a part of the central information
commission, has not been approved yet. The requirement for framing fresh RTI
Rules that is the draft RTI Rules 2017 was undertaken after a direction from
the apex court. In March last year, the DoPT, under which the CIC comes, had
come out with a set of rules.
The draft RTI
Rules 2017 are aimed at changing the procedure of the Act, and not the Act
itself. However, objections within the CIC had led to the CIC failing to
unanimously approve the revised RTI rules. Officials say the file at present
has not been put up for approval after the objections voiced by the information
commissioners. The draft RTI Rules 2017 had also raised hackles of information
activists, who had pointed to several flaws.
According to
officials though, the revised RTI rules have significantly improved provisions,
such as the introduction of procedures to deal with non-compliance of the
information commissioners' (IC) orders. Not only users of the Act, but even the
IC exercising its supervisory jurisdiction has faced non-compliance of its
orders from public information officers (PIOs) and public authorities (the
organisations/offices) that are to provide information. They have also come in
for criticism from ICs who have criticised the introduction of new rules that
give more powers to chief information commissioner to assign any RTI appeal to
a commissioner in larger public interest. ICs Sridhar Acharyulu and
Yashovardhan Azad had expressed strong reservations to insertion of a new Rule
15 and said it would be "misused" by the government. They had pointed
out for the need for CIC to be seen as independent and "not a part of the
government".
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