‘RTI Act not for stalling govt’s work’

Times of India: Lucknow: Monday, August 03, 2015.

Contending that the RTI Act is meant to ensure transparency and accountability by allowing common man to have information in larger public interest and no way it should create a stumbling block in the functioning of the government, the state information commission disposed a bunch of cases filed by a research scholar against Lucknow University authorities.

Information commissioner Arvind Singh Bisht said in his order that the applicant, Saurabh Gupta, filed as many as 41 RTI applications seeking mostly information about PhD admissions, nominations and upgradations.

The commission clubbed all the applications to take a holistic view and avoid issuing different orders on appeals which were of similar nature. The commission observed that Gupta went on filing a barrage of RTI applications after the LU authorities refused to grant him upgrdation from a junior research fellow to senior research fellow citing anomalies in his papers.

Citing a Supreme Court that 'impractical demands of directions under the RTI Act for disclosure of all and sundry information would be counter-productive', the commission said "while the university had a settled view that the applicant could not be granted the SRF upgradation, the applicant apparently appeared to have taken offence and nursed its grudge against it...this was neither ethically correct nor permissible under the provisions of the RTI Act."