The
Times of India: Bhopal: Sunday, November 11, 2012.
Who is the
chief minister of Madhya Pradesh - is a mystery that babudom in the state is
yet to crack.
This chance
discovery was made by activist and high court lawyer Nityanand Mishra when he
made an RTI query seeking the details of "all foreign tours undertaken by
the Madhya Pradesh chief minister in the last five years". Not only his
application was rejected by the RTI officer - a deputy secretary in general
administration department (GAD) - for sketchy account of the person under
scanner but Mishra was roundly rebuffed and reminded by the officer concerned
that it was not his job to collect information and hand it over and the
applicant needed to be specific.
On May 9,
Mishra had submitted an application before the RTI officer in Bhopal that
sought information about the number of foreign trips the MP CM had made in last
five years apart from the particulars about his entourage - names of officials
/family members and also the expenditure incurred.
The response
completely baffled him. Signed by GAD deputy secretary Brijesh Kaul, the letter
informed that his application stood rejected as it did not give any clue of the
identity of the person he wished to inquire about. Kaul wrote "Aavedak ke
patra mein yeh ullekh nahin hai ki wah kis vyakti ke bare mein jankari chahate
hain" (The application is not clear about whom the applicant wants the
information).
The officer
further reminded Mishra that as per the provisions of the RTI Act 2005, his job
was to furnish information which was available to him and not to gather
information and provide it to the applicants. The letter ended with a terse
direction to make an unambiguous reference about the person under inquiry next
time.
This is
bizarre, Mishra fumed. This letter, he told TOI on Saturday, could be
interpreted in two ways - either MP has more than one chief minister or
officers in GAD need a crash course in general knowledge. "If an under
secretary in the state government cannot guess about the identity of the MP CM,
then the issue takes a sinister proportion, he said. Refusing to believe that
it is a case of a bureaucratic goof up, the activist sees a conspiracy to keep
the expenditure about the CM's foreign trips under cover."
Not the one
to give up , he has filed an appeal before the principal secretary GAD in the
hope the officer would come up with a more acceptable and less juvenile excuse.
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