Times
of India: New Delhi: Friday, 10 October 2014.
If you were
to file an RTI in Madhya Pradesh information commission your appeal would come
up after 60 years while it would be a 17-year wait in West Bengal. In Rajasthan
the appeal would take over three years, while in Assam and Kerala the applicant
would have to wait two years to be heard. Nearly six information commissions
including the Central Information Commission have a waiting period of over a
year.
Days before
the tenth anniversary of the Right to Information (RTI) Act that falls on
October 13 a study by RTI Assessment and Advocacy Group (RaaG) and Samya-Centre
for Equity Studies in collaboration with NCPRI paints an alarming picture of
Information Commissions across the country caving in under the weight of
pending cases. The collective backlog in 23 commissions is about 1.98 lakh as
on December 31, 2013. The maximum number of appeals and complaints were pending
in Uttar Pradesh (48,442), Maharashtra (32,390) and the Central Information
Commission (26,115).
"The
massive backlog in disposal of appeals and complaints in the information
commissions is effectively denying people their fundamental right to
information-it is resulting in citizens having to wait for excessively long
periods of time to have their appeals and complaints heard," the report
"People's Monitoring of the RTI Regime in India 2011-2013" said. The
report will be released on Friday.
Despite a
lesser burden of cases, the slow rate of disposal by the Madhya Pradesh
commission (about 21 cases a month) will force a new appeal to be heard only
after 60 years and 10 months while in West Bengal where the information
commissioners decide on 40 cases a month the waiting period is 17 years and 10
months. In fact an appeal filed with the West Bengal information commission in
2009 as part of the 2008-2009 RaaG study was scheduled for hearing five years
later on September 19, 2014.
The sluggish
pace of disposal is replicated in the Rajasthan information commission where
disposal is 341 cases a month followed by 43 cases in Assam. The waiting period
is 3 years and 4 months for Rajasthan, two years each for Assam and Kerala and
over a year for Andhra, UP, Chhattisgarh, Karnataka and Maharashtra.
The CIC ranks
10th in disposal rate with a waiting period of one year. Ideally, RTI
applicants approach information commissions after being denied information by
the public authority in a two-tiered decision. Unless it is a matter of life or
death the applicant must first approach the public information officer and then
the appellate authority only after 30 days. It is denial on both stages that
leads the applicant to the commission.
.JPG)
.JPG)
