Times
of India: Mumbai: Wednesday, 03 September 2014.
The Modi
government's cleanliness drive saw 11,000 home ministry files being disposed of
within a month of it assuming office, but what remains shrouded in secrecy two
months later is what files were destroyed and the method of destruction.
The home
ministry in reply to an RTI query said: "List of files which are destroyed
is being compiled. This can be made available in due course on payment of
requisite fee. You may write to us if so desired. (sic)"
After a row
erupted over the destruction of files and allegations of the government trying
to rewrite history, home minister Rajnath Singh told Parliament that no file
relating to Mahatma Gandhi, former president Rajendra Prasad, former prime
minister Lal Bahadur Shastri or the last Indian viceroy Lord Mountbatten has
been destroyed. "Files have been categorized as per the mandate of the
manual of office procedure," he had told the Rajya Sabha.
But the home
ministry reply to the RTI query states that these files are still being
compiled. Venkatesh Nayak, RTI activist and programmes coordinator with
Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, who filed the RTI, said it was surprising
that the home ministry destroyed the files without preparing a list for review.
"If the
MHA did not have a preliminary list of files to be reviewed for destruction,
how exactly did the weeding process take place? Did the 500 officers whom the
Home Minister stated were involved in the weeding exercise, simply walked into
the records rooms or to the shelves where the old files were kept and started
weeding them out one by one?"
Nayak also
asked for the "half-yearly report of the records weeded out during the
latest clearing exercise, prepared by your ministry for submission to the
Director General Archives, as per Rule 9(4) of the Public Records Rules,
1997." The reply said no such report had been sent to National Archives.
As for a
simple question on how the files were destroyed (burnt, shredded or both), the
reply said, "Record Retention Schedule of MHA is available on the website
of MHA (mha.gov.in)."
However, a
search for a "record retention schedule" on the MHA website yields
none. It is available on the website of the department of administrative
reforms and public grievances but it does not contain any details on how files
are disposed of. These details, though, are available in the Central
Secretariat Manual of Office Procedure, on the same website. But it still
doesn't answer the question on how the 11,000 files were destroyed.
A further
query asked for the number of MHA officers authorized to clear the files, as
well as their designations and also the designations of representatives of the
national archives present. The reply involved a paragraph in a letter from the
Cabinet secretary which said, "Files and papers should be weeded out in
accordance with the rules of record keeping including digitization wherever
necessary. This exercise should be completed within three to four weeks."
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