Indian Express: Sun Oct 17 2010, Ahmedabad:
Torn between duty to disclose facts and pressure to hide them, Public Information Officers from across the country look for tips to survive
One afternoon this past week, a Public Information Officer(PIO) from Rajkot district rang an RTI helpline to share a curious predicament — on one hand, he had numerous documents indicating pilfering of public money and on the other, he had a clutch of RTI queries asking for them.
Torn between his duty and political pressure from powerful MLAs, he said he was considering withholding the documents for one-and-a-half-years, by when he hoped he would either be transferred or the MLAs would lose election. A one-and-a-half-year delay, he reckoned, would also not incur too stiff a reprimand from the State Information Commissioner.
This was just one of the 175 calls the Mahiti Adhikar Gujarat Pahel, an initiative started by a clutch of NGOs, received in the first two days after it began counselling callers last week on what to do in case they feel threatened. Interestingly, roughly half the callers were government officials, of which about a dozen were PIOs.
“There is no doubt there are PIOs who actively block RTI queries and provide misleading information. But there are also many PIOs who are junior-level officials who don’t know what to do ¿ perform their duties or obey their seniors who ask them to not disclose certain things,” said helpline coordinator Pankti Jog.
A PIO from a university in West Bengal called to voice his frustrations at being scorned by both the university staff and the students; there had been more than 50 RTI applications from students asking why scholarships for the engineering students had not been disbursed for the past two semesters.
“When I forwarded one of the first applications to the engineering department, they did not respond. The 30-day deadline was almost up, and
I knew the scholarship money had reached the university but the department was delaying the disbursement. So, I had to give a vague reply, making excuses of ‘procedural delay’,” the PIO said.
Then there are some who lack basic facilities to proactively disclose information as per Section 4 of the RTI Act, let alone reply to RTI queries.
A jail superintendent in Saurashtra said the jail is not connected to the “gswan” network (an e-network of the Gujarat government’s departments) since there is no Internet connection and not even a permanent land-line telephone.
“At the same time, inmates and their families file RTIs asking for jail manuals, which should in fact be part of the proactive disclosures. But we can’t even provide them even that,” the superintendent said.
A Talati-cum-PIO from Kutch district has a unique tale to tell. In seven villages within his jurisdiction, many people have migrated to Mumbai while their lands here have been occupied by co-villagers. Coming to know of this, the ones in Mumbai began filing RTIs asking for their land details.
“As Talati, I am the one who examines the land records. At the same time, I have to answer all the RTI queries. I can’t find the time to do everything. So, I have hundreds of unanswered RTI queries at my office,” he said.
There have also been many calls from PIOs like Punjab who say they mostly get pension-related queries, from Uttar Pradesh, who usually try and find out details of the RTI applicants before issuing replies, and Haryana (mostly about land scams), said Jog.
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