Times of India: Hyderabad: Sunday,
April 17, 2016.
The Right to
Information Act (RTI) has been enacted with a lofty goal of ensuring
transparency and accountability in the working of every public authority and is
considered a powerful instrument in the hands of citizens to expose corruption.
But that is not the case, it seems. Several applicants are furious as they are
not getting information for the queries they are posing in the country. What is
even worse is brazenly irresponsible reply. To many applications, the terse
reply is 'Nil'.
The officials
seem to be finding it quite easy to write 'Nil' and post the responses back.
But citizens taking all the pain to take recourse to the Right to Information
(RTI) Act to find out the working of the public authorities are a disappointed
lot.
One such
applicant is Kalpesh Lalit Kumar Gupta, an assistant professor of law, from
Surat. He had filed an RTI query with the Union ministry of finance. He got
more than 1,000 letters but not the information that he required.
In Telangana,
an RTI applicant wrote letters to all the 10 district collectors on what
measures they had taken to create public awareness about RTI. He also sought to
know how much money was spent in spreading awareness.
"I have
got replies from seven collectors a week ago and the information I got is
shocking. The reply simply mentions 'Nil'. I will await the response from other
collectors also and take recourse to law. If necessary, I will file police
complaints against them," said Gadda Thirupathi.
An RTI
activist, Rakesh Reddy Dubbudu of Hyderabad also has not got information that
he has been seeking under the Act. He wanted to know if any central government
employee had been asked to compulsorily retire in the last 15 years as per CCS
and other rules. "So far I have got 500 letters as replies from various
departments. The information furnished is 'Nil' in the reports. Only in one
reply I got information that one person had retired," Rakesh Reddy told
STOI. Every day as many as 20-30 letters come with invariably the same reply.
Another
applicant, Pramod Rao Errabelli, had approached the ministry of home affairs
asking if any complaints had been lodged in Delhi and NCR region against Amway,
and multi-level marketing scams. The response he got from every police station
in Delhi and NCR region was: "The requisite information may be treated as
NIL".
"It
clearly shows that they are not interested in parting with any information. I
will now be writing to the DGPs of every state for information on complaints
against multi-level marketing companies," Pramod Rao said.
Apart from
getting 'Nil' information which is frustrating, RTI applicants are annoyed that
a lot of public money is wasted by government departments in sending their
replies through speed post. "Why should one get hundreds of letters? The
information can be collated by the head office of the department internally.
The applicant can be sent one reply with the collated information,"
Dubbudu said.
He said close
to Rs 10,000 would have been spent by the government departments on sending
replies to him. Kalpesh Lalit Kumar Gupta described as 'waste' the amount of Rs
50,000 that was used for postage to send him 1000 letters from various offices
under the ministry of finance for an RTI query he had sent.
The
applicants said even the postmen are getting angry at the number of letters
that are having to deliver to the RTI applicants. Sanjeev Kumar, who filed an
RTI application with the agriculture ministry on subsidy for seeds, said he
gets 50-70 registered posts everyday and the postman is not really pleased.
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