Economic
Times: New Delhi: Friday, 27 March 2015.
Lok Sabha and
Rajya Sabha secretariats and Delhi High Court are among some prominent offices
which have not filed mandatory annual reports of compliance of RTI Act even
once since the transparency law was enacted nine years ago, according to an
advocacy group.
Commonwealth
Human Right Initiative did a study of annual reports of the Central Information
Commission which has been tabled in the Parliament every year and concluded
that CIC is not able to compel a large number of public authorities to submit
data.
Every public
authority under the RTI Act is mandated to submit the statistics related to
processing of the information seeking applications every year to the CIC.
"More
than a quarter of the public authorities have not reported their RTI stats to
the CIC. The reporting compliance rose in 2012-13 but fell again in 2013-14.
The highest rate was in 2005-06 followed by 2007-08 when the reporting was more
than 85 per cent," the analysis by Venkatesh Nayak shows.
He claimed
there is a drop in the per centage of public authorities reporting to the CIC
on RTI statistics.
"Parliament
secretariats of the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha have never given RTI statistics
to the CIC even once in the last nine years. This is something which the CIC is
not even mentioning in its report.
"Yet,
Parliament has the right to get annual reports on the implementation of the RTI
Act every year. This is a contradiction of sorts that the supervisory body
itself has never submitted RTI statistics to the CIC," he alleged.
Nayak claimed
that Delhi High Court also has never submitted RTI statistics to the CIC till
date although the Supreme Court has done so every year.
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