RTI: College rapped for charging 'fees'

Times of India‎‎: Chennai: Monday, August 15, 2016.

Can a public information officer (PIO) demand 'search fees' to process a Right to Information (RTI) application? The Tamil Nadu State Information Commission (SIC) has deemed that there is no provision in the law to do so while disposing of a case on July 25 where an individual filed an RTI application with D G Vaishnav College in the city.

The autonomous institution is affiliated to University of Madras and an SIC official said there was no clarity on whether such colleges came under the ambit of the RTI Act. The college's principal, M Venkatramanan, said they could have rejected the application but didn't do so in the interest of 'fair play'.

The applicant, Dr S Mahalingam of Koyambedu, had filed an RTI application with the college this February asking for 14 items of information under five heads.

The PIO of the college, the principal himself, asked the petitioner to deposit 1,000 as fees required to search the document demanded by the applicant. Mahalingam filed an appeal with the SIC pointing out that 'search fees' were not justified under as per the RTI Act.

During inquiry, the college argued that Section 7(3) of the RTI Act, which used the words 'details of further fees representing the cost of providing the information as determined by him', gave PIOs the leeway to fix such search fees.

In response to this, the information commissioner, K Ramanujam, stated that PIOs could demand fees only in terms of rules notified by the state government and that no power was vested with the PIO to determine the same. The act has been framed in a manner that fees are not dependent of the subjective judgement of individual PIOs, he said in the order.

"At best the PIO can only prescribe the charge for supply of copy in size larger than A3 or the price for a sample or model, as laid down in Fees Rule 3(b)(ii) and (iii). Even in such cases, he has no discretion to charge more than the actual cost incurred," Ramanujam said in the order.

Ramanujam cited an example of how lack of oversight and an independent organisation had failed to enforce consistency in a case pertaining to USA's Freedom of Information Act.

For an application requesting identical information, two branches of the armed forces had billed the applicant $1.6 lakhs and $1,584 as processing fee.