Morung Express: Kohima: Sunday, February 21, 2016.
The Nagaland
Voluntary Consumers’ Organization (NVCO) today informed that it has been doing
a study on the use of RTI across the State to find out its impact in Nagaland
for the last ten years.
In the course
of the study, the organization detected both positive and negative impact of
RTI, said a press release from Press & Medial Cell, NVCO. Citing an
instance of positive impact, NVCO narrated that a young woman had been rejected
for a job (through written and oral interview) by a particular State government
department. However, when she filed an RTI, the performance records showed that
her written examination marks alone was more than the marks secured by the
selected candidate in both written and interview. It was also discovered that
the interview board had marked her as ‘absent’ on the interview day. Following
this, the selected/ appointed candidate was terminated and the young woman was
appointed to the said post.
On the other
hand, NVCO also came across number of cases on misuse of the RTI Act such as
“using for personal gain, harassing the public authorities, threatening, filing
just to negotiate with some financial benefits, taking money and withdraw the
RTI application, the public authorities bribing the applicants and attempting
to bribe the applicants, etc.”
Meanwhile,
NVCO pointed out that awareness on RTI is still low in Nagaland. “Lack of
transparency and accountability encourages the government officials to indulge
in lower investments due to misuse or diversion of funds for private purposes,”
it stated. In this regard, it added, RTI Act can be used as the best weapon
which can reduce corruption to a great deal.
It was also
informed that NVCO conducted interview with KC Angami, during whose tenure as
president, the Nagaland Govt. Registered Class-1 Contractors’ Union (NGRC-1 CU)
filed the first five RTI cases before Nagaland Information Commission (NIC).
Angami
maintained that RTI Act is also helping in checking the contracts for
infrastructural development, especially in tendering process and manipulation
of rates. “This law is good for honest citizens but may not be convenient for
unscrupulous citizens,” NVCO quoted Angami as saying.
“The union is
constantly filing RTI application and even in the recent time we received
documents where a lot of violation of ethics of technicality was detected
including financial irregularity and also wrongly kept project/ public funds
meant for payment in civil deposit (CD),” Angami added. “The union is still
working on it and the union would continue to promote transparency in the
profession especially in the tendering process by using the RTI law as the best
weapon to fight for fairness and reasonability so as to ensure good quality of
work in public infrastructural works be roads or buildings, etc.”
In the press
release, NVCO mentioned that Nagaland Information Commission celebrates its
10th anniversary on March 3, 2016. The Commission was constituted on March 14,
2006 with Talitemjen Ao, retired Chief Secretary to the Govt. of Nagaland as
the first State Chief Information Commissioner along with Rev. Dr. W. Pongsing
Konyak and Dr. Kuhoi K. Zhimomi as State Information Commissioners, it added.
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