Grievances against civic bodies flood RTI camp.

Hindustan Times : Gurgaon : Saturday, May 25, 2013. 

To expedite the hearing of Right to Information (RTI) appeal cases filed from Gurgaon and nearby areas, one of the state information commissioners, JS Kundu, organised a two-day camp here. Twenty-six cases related to the Municipal Corporation of Gurgaon (MCG) were heard at the camp, which ended on Friday.

Aseem Takyar, a Gurgaon-based RTI activist, who had two cases heard before the commissioner, said: “I had filed an appeal after the MCG failed to give me a reply regarding the absence of street lights on Old Delhi Road. The commissioner has sent a show-cause notice to the officials.”

Kundu also heard RTI appeal cases against the Municipal Corporation of Faridabad and of applicants who came from as far as Pataudi and Jhajjar. Out of the nearly 400 RTI applications the state information commission (SIC) receives, most are filed from Gurgaon and are primarily against urban development and civic bodies.

To enable swift disposal of cases, the Haryana SIC sets up such camps once every two months. But it still has about 3,500 pending RTI cases lying unaddressed. Out of the ten sanctioned posts of information commissioners in Haryana, only five are manned at present, thereby adding to the piling of case files.

The state SIC on Monday launched video conferencing facilities for hearing from far-off places. Thanks to this facility, applicants will not be required to travel all the way to the SIC office in Chandigarh anymore.