The
Hindu: Pune: Tuesday, 23 December 2014.
While
activists have been crying foul over an amendment to Maharashtra Right to Information
Act rules effected by the erstwhile Congress-NCP government in 2012 restricting
a petitioner’s plea to 150 words, a State Information Commissioner (SIC) has
contended that the move has proved counterproductive for the government.
D.B.
Deshpande, SIC, has observed that Maharashtra’s amendment to the RTI Act
brought about by the erstwhile Prithviraj Chavan government two years earlier
had defeated its purpose of streamlining the flow of information seekers by
instead making the process of filing pleas more onerous.
The amendment
made in January 2012 limited the request for information to 150 words with the
further caveat that the request must pertain to one subject matter only and
that separate applications must be made in the event of the request pertaining
to more than one subject.
“I fear the
process to streamline information seekers has backfired with one applicant
filing no less than 39 second appeals merely to know how stamp duty was
collected and calculated,” observed Mr. Deshpande, stating that the applicant
had resorted to filing multiple appeals, as his RTI application had been
repeatedly turned down by the public information officer (PIO) on the ground
that the information sought was outside the purview of the Act.
The former
State government had introduced the change with a view to drastically reduce
the time taken to answer long RTI applications. But according to activists,
almost 30 per cent of the information requests since 2012 have been rejected by
information authorities who cite the amendment.
“The limiting
of the petitioner’s brief to 150 words not only paradoxically increases the
paperwork but can also be used as a convenient pretext by PIOs to deny
information. Hence, we had filed a PIL challenging the amendment in 2012 as
well as a fresh one recently in the Bombay High Court,” said Pune-based RTI
activist Vijay Kumbhar.
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