Indian
Express: New Delhi: Sunday, 12 July 2015.
Central
public sector companies are trying to identify people who repeatedly use the
Right to Information (RT) route to ferret out information from them. Companies
are trawling their records about such people and will match data to draw up a
checklist. And they plan to use this list to block such requests.
The companies
claim they have the right to do this, since repeated information sought from
them can be pieced together by rivals as price sensitive data. They says this
allows rivals in the private sector, even competitors abroad, to draw up
strategies to checkmate them.
The agency
helping them is their umbrella lobby organisation, Standing Committee on Public
Enterprises or Scope.
U D Choubey,
Director General of Scope, said habitual seekers of “irrelevant clarifications”
under RTI are affecting the productivity of public sector enterprises.
“Scope has
written to all its constituent public sector companies for providing the list
of habitual seekers of queries. Once the list is obtained, (we) shall take up
the issue with the august institution of Central Information Commission (CIC),”
he said.
While the
public sector companies have at times complained that the 10-year-old RTI
regime has made their competitive position unequal, this is the first time they
have decided to come together on a joint strategy.
The CIC
estimates that each year, the 290 public sector companies receive about a
million RTI requests.
Former CIC
Satyananda Mishra said he is not sure if state-owned enterprises can create a
defensive wall even if they determine who is repeatedly seeking information
from them.
“The RTI law does not allow for any such
segregation requests. The companies have to provide the information and live
with it the best they can,” he said. Unless the Act is amended, there is little
the CIC can do to help them, he said.
The companies
plan to approach the CIC with their data to press for an amendment.
Mishra said
the problem is genuine but the companies often err by not appointing or
training officers on how to handle such queries. He said for repetitive queries,
the companies should preserve answers and dash it off again.
Incidentally,
several cases of corruption in state-run enterprises have been nailed by the
use of RTI. Mineral and manufacturing companies including Coal India, NMDC and
Nalco have had to scale up inquiries against senior officers after such queries
made investigating agencies take note. But Choubey said their effort to
streamline RTI requests is not meant to block corruption-related cases.
The RTI
exercise comes close to another one begun by the government last week to clip
the role of chief vigilance officers in public sector enterprises, including a
possible downgrade. The Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) has asked
for a revamp of the role of these vigilance officers in state-run units for
which it has sought a feedback from them.
Proposals on
the table include clubbing the office of vigilance officers for more than one
company and modifying their position in the organisation hierarchy. As of now,
chief vigilance officers in public sector units report directly to chief
executives since 1999 but the DoPT has
asked if this too needs to change.
“Whether the
post of CVOs is required to continue with the current posts or wishes to
upgrade/downgrade or to abolish the posts in view of the workload and
requirement of vigilance related matters,” states the office memorandum issued
by the department to state-run companies.
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