Times
of India: Mumbai: Friday, 16 October 2015.
State chief
information commissioner Ratnakar Gaikwad wants the Right to Information Act to
be amended to make it enforceable for every public authority to put all
information in the public domain.
Ten years
after the Act was enacted, Gaikwad said the public authorities still do not
think it necessary to put out all information, though Section 4 of the RTI Act
requires it
RTI activist
Bhaskar Prabhu said this was why there were so many RTI queries. Most queries,
he said, relate to things that affect people directly. No municipal body,
including the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, he said, was willing to put
up information from the building proposal (BP) department. The collector's
office was reluctant to put in the public domain land records and the public
distribution system was silent on the amount of grains available in every PDS
shop.
Prabhu added
that the social justice department, which caters to some of the poorest in the
state, was still to provide details of benefits to various sections of society.
Janhit Manch
secretary Utsal Karani said it was a herculean task to obtain information.
"In the case of the BMC, if a query is filed with the BP department,
payment has to be made at the ward and information collected from the
department, at the other end of the city. The objective is to frustrate you and
ensure you do not use the RTI,'' he said, adding that if Section 4 was
implemented, there would be fewer RTI queries filed.
Karani said
files pertaining to the BP department were often incomplete. At the Slum
Rehabilitation Authority (SRA), a builder's man often gives files and papers.
Gaikwad said, "Section 4, the heart and soul of the RTI Act, must be
amended for the Act to be effective," he said.
On the
performance of information commissioners in Maharashtra, Gaikwad said there
were two aspects: Quantitative and qualitative. "In the last decade,
around 44 lakh RTI queries were received across the state and 99% disposed of.
Of the 1.54 lakh queries that have gone into appeal, 1.2 lakh have been
disposed of. As on September 30, around 30,000 are pending,'' he said.
Maharashtra,
he said, was the only state to have an RTI training centre for public
information officers (PIOs). "YASHDA, the state administrative training
institute, provides training at its RTI centre. It is the only one in the
country to be recognised as a national training institute for RTI. Of 85,000
PIOs, 25,000 have been trained here. It has made a difference to the quality of
replies sent out,'' he said.
The state
information commissioner also wants a provision to be introduced in the Act to
punish those who use it for blackmail. "Such persons must be
blacklisted,'' he said, adding that there must be a limit on the number of RTIs
a person can file before the same PIO in a month.
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