Calcutta
Telegraph: New Delhi: Thursday, 28 January 2016.
The Central
Information Commission has chided the office of Delhi Chief Minister Arvind
Kejriwal for “not applying its mind” before forwarding the petition of a senior
citizen to a department that in turn sent it on a journey across 28 more
departments.
The
Commission said it finds it “pathetic” that a high office such as the Chief
Minister’s Office has the unhealthy habit of forwarding applications under the
Right to Information Act.
The CIC has
directed the CMO to furnish a white paper on the status of all kinds of
pensions in Delhi Government, reasons for non-payment, time of payment of
arrears and time of resumption of payment of pension etc. within 20 days.
Information
Commissioner Sridhar Acharyulu also directed the CMO to pay a compensation of
Rs 1 lakh to applicant Charanjeet Singh Bhatia and initiate action against all
the Public Information Officers (PIOs) who “unnecessarily” transferred the
application to others.
”CMO has not
applied its mind to the serious issue raised by the appellant and acted like a
post office by simply forwarding his RTI application to other departments, who
in turn, went on transferring to other departments,” he said.
He said the
CMO and other officers are not ready to inform the appellant why they are not
paying the pension or when they can start paying the pension.
Bhatia had
filed an RTI application to find out why his differently-abled wife did not get
her pension for 10 months from July 2014.
Later,
cheques for April, May and June 2014 were were delivered to him in February
2015. Bhatia claimed to have sent several letters to the chief minister about
lack of budgetary allocations because of which his wife was not getting
handicapped pension.
The CMO
informed him that his RTI application was sent to PIOs of four departments and
asked him to approach them directly.
Each
department told the applicant that his petition had been forwarded, but not one
of them gave the reply Bhatia had sought.
”The CMO
should have replied (to) the appellant that they are not in a position to
release the funds and they cannot pay pension. Instead they have transferred to
various departments without disclosure of information,” he said.
Acharyulu
directed that the CMO should recover Rs 100 from each of PIOs involved in the
process and deposit it in CM Welfare Fund.