Pune
Mirror: Pune: Thursday, March 06, 2014.
Faced with a
paucity of court fee stamps of Rs 5 and Rs 10 denominations in the city,
litigants and RTI applicantsare being forced to buy stamps of higher
denominations to file applications in courts.
While the
District Treasury Office claims the shortage has been caused by the
non-issuance of stamps by the India Security Press, Nashik, despite repeated
requests in the past week, sources term it as an “artificial scarcity” there
are 400-plus vendors around the city who allegedly make a fortune selling them
outside the district.
Meanwhile,
some claim the scarcity is due to the rise in the number of RTI applications
filed by the general public, caused by a tide of increasing awareness.
For the past
one week, stamps of lower denominations have not been available anywhere in the
city, including the Pune Lawyers Consumers Co-op Society, the largest vendor in
the district, located in the premises of District and Sessions Court in
Shivajinagar, where stamps worth lakhs of rupees are sold every day.
Speaking to
Mirror, Ganesh Game, manager of the Pune Lawyers Consumers Co-op Society, said,
“For the past one week, we don’t have stamps of Rs 5 and Rs 10 denominations.
We have requested the District Treasury Office several times, but we are not
getting any response from them.”
Lawyer Vikas
Dhage-Patil, president of the Pune Bar Association (PBA), said, “Litigants and
lawyers are forced to pay more because of the non-availability of stamps of
lower denominations.We have to find out whether this shortage is genuine or
artificially created.
We are going
to send a letter to the State Treasury department to resolve the issue. The
concerned department is complacent about resolving this issue, as buying stamps
of higher denominations generates huge revenue for them.”
Saying filing
of RTI applications is also affected due to the non-availability of stamps of
denominations of less than Rs 25, tree activist Vinod Jain told Mirror, “Filing
RTI applications is a powerful tool, but the common citizen is being held back
due to the paucity of lower denomination stamps. Now, they are forced to spend
more. It is against provisions of the law refunds should be made.”
“There’s a
scarcity, because vendors and lawyers tend to overstock, and stamps of Rs 5 and
Rs 10 denominations are in demand because of the steep rise in the number of
people filing RTI queries,” added Jain.
When
contacted, an official at the District Treasury Office said, “We get our
monthly stock from the Pradhan Mudrank Karyalaya in Mumbai, but we have been informed
that production at the Nashik press has been scaled down resulting in a huge
shortage of stamps. We will go to the Pradhan Mudrank Karyalaya again on March
11, and hope the problem will be resolved soon.”
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