Mid-Day:
Mumbai: Tuesday, 25 August 2015.
A CR officer
apologised to the public yesterday, four days after she rejected an RTI query
because it was framed in Marathi. Following a protest by the MNS at CST, she
issued a written apology claiming it was a “human error”.
Insult to
injuryOn June 22, petitioner Subhash Jagtap an advocate from Mulund had sent an
RTI query to CR, asking, among other things, why the railways only printed
tickets in Hindi and English but not Marathi.
The response
he received on August 20 only hurt his Maharashtrian pride further: the letter
from CR stated that since his request had been made in Marathi, it could not be
understood and had hence been rejected.
Signed by
Swati Sinha, deputy chief commercial manager (claims) and assistant public
information officer, the letter asked that the request be made again in English
or Hindi. Ironically, the very same letter also cited Rule 6 of the RTI Act,
according to which a request may be made in English, Hindi or in the official
language of the area in which the application is being made Marathi, in this
case.
The letter
was widely debated in Mantralaya by various ministers, including opposition
leader Radha Krishna Vikhe Patil, who said he would put the issue in front of
Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu (who hails from Mumbai). The MNS took up the
issue and staged a protest outside CST yesterday.
After
mounting criticism of the RTI rejection, yesterday, CR officer Sinha apologised
for the letter. “It was a human error and I apologise for it. My clerk had
typed the letter and I signed it without reading it properly,” she said, adding
that her office had already responded to 100-odd RTI queries in Marathi in the
past.
RTI applicant
Jagtap told mid-day, “I had asked for details on why tickets are not printe in
Marathi, why the Kurla subway had not been opened yet and what had happened to
the R80 crore given to railways by the BM for drainage work. I think they did
not like my questions and were looking for a way to avoid giving answers.”
This is the
second slight to Maharashtra since the railways forgot to advertise vacancies
for the post of section engineers in the state. The railways had had to
apologise for this error as well, and later posted information about 400
vacancies.
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