Times of India: Bhopal: Thursday, April 18, 2013.
If you are
denied information under Right to Information (RTI) Act by government
departments-you can appeal or complain with information commission but what if
your appeal takes eight years or more to get heard simply, then you are
deprived of your legal right to avail information.
This is the
case in Madhya Pradesh where about 12,800 applications are pending with the
information commission.
Replying to
an RTI query by TOI, state information commission has informed that among the
pending 12,800 applications, 64 are pending for as long as eight years, i.e.,
from the year 2005, when the act was implemented all over the country. Out of
these pending applications, 11,128 are appeals made with the commission and
remaining 1,672 are complaints.
As per RTI
Act, if an applicant is not satisfied or if the public information officer
doesn't provides information within the stipulated 30 days, the applicants
could make a first appeal with the appellate authority of the same department
from where the information was sought, but if the applicant is not satisfied
with the decision of appellate authority, it could make appeal or complaint
with the state information commission.
The Act,
states that there has to be a chief information commissioner and a maximum of
ten information commissioners, but at present Madhya Pradesh is having not even
a single information commissioner. The last information commissioner Iqbal
Ahmed retired in January this year, and the chief information commissioner P P
Tiwari retired in March 2012 since then no commissioners have been appointed.
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