Hindustan
Times: New Delhi: Monday, 15 February 2016.
Should a
government department spend Rs 27 to get an RTI applicant to pay a fee of Rs 8?
Yes, said
chief information commissioner RK Mathur in a controversial decision this week,
overruling a “common sense” decision delivered by his predecessor, Satyananda
Mishra.
The CIC was
hearing an appeal where Right to Information (RTI) applicant Subhash Chandra
Agrawal had questioned the logic of the Supreme Court spending Rs 27 in postal
charges to ask him to pay Rs 8 for four sheets of paper.
The rules
require government departments to make citizens pay Rs 2 for every page of
information received under the Right to Information Act.
Wouldn’t it
be cheaper for the government if it just gave away the information for free,
Agrawal had asked.
Mishra had
agreed with this line of thought when he had in 2013 told the home ministry it
might be technically correct to ask for a Rs 2 fee for a page of information,
but it certainly wasn’t prudent as “much more public money is lost in
correspondence”.
Mathur, who
took over as CIC last month, said Mishra’s decision “was rendered in ignorance
of the statutory provisions” and not binding on this commission.
But the
information commission has repeatedly questioned this provision.
Just last
November, information commissioner M Sridhar Acharyulu took the national green
tribunal to task for spending Rs 30,000 in legal fees to defend its decision of
not providing information to a citizen who had paid the Rs 10 RTI fee in court
stamps and not via postal order.
“The law has
to conform to common sense,” said Mishra while another former CIC, AN Tiwari,
termed this penny wise, pound foolish rule an “absurdity”.
Like Mathur,
Tiwari and Mishra too were IAS officers. They retired from the department of
personnel that oversees the implementation of the transparency law before being
appointed to the commission. An IIT alumnus, Mathur retired as defence
secretary last year.
A retired
government official said if the previous UPA government had gone strictly by
the book, the RTI Act may have been dead by now. The law ministry had told
former PM Manmohan Singh that information commissioners could only decide cases
if all of them sat on the bench together. Singh’s office had, however, advised
against pursuing this line as it could be counterproductive to the spirit of
the law.
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