‘I got no response to my RTI application’

Neelambari Bhoge : Pune Mirror : Tuesday, September 07, 2010 :

The Right To Information Act (RTI) has helped the common man to know his rights. When a citizen files an application s/he is supposed to get a response in 30 days.

However, Sunanda Patil, a resident of Kothrud filed an RTI application regarding the enrolling the names of property cards in Mauje, Chinchwad with the Pimpri Chinchwad Municipal Corporation(PCMC) in February. Till date, she has not received any reply. She had sent the application by post.

Sunanda Patil had filed the RTI in
February. She is yet to get a reply

“I had sent an application on February 2, 2010 but did not receive any reply. When I asked officials regarding the status of my application, I was told that it had been dispatched from PCMC.

They gave me a copy of the acknowledgement. When I looked at the acknowledgement, I saw that the the address had been typed wrongly. I realised that the reply must have been dispatched to some other address.”

According to Sunanda, she had mentioned her detailed address in her application. She had also mentioned her contact details, but despite all this, she is still to receive any reply.

“After this application, I also filed other RTIs, but the replies I received are very vague,” she added. This reporter got in touch with the officer of city survey Hemant Saanap and he said, “Under the RTI Act, whatever information we have, we give it to the applicant.

There are no modifications or manipulations in the information. It is given the way it is. We dispatch the reply to the applicant by post. If the applicant does not receive it, the applicant is given another copy of the reply by hand or by post. It rarely happens that a address is mistyped. We always inform the applicant regarding the response to his application.”

However, Jugal Rathi, a city RTI activist says, “It is the bureaucratic attitude of the officials that makes them give incomplete information so that the applicant gets fed up and forget about the application half-way. An applicant should pursue the matter, understand the RTI completely and carry out the complete procedure.”