Daily Excelsior: Jammu: Friday,
September 02, 2016.
Agitated over
the fast collapsing Right to Information in the State, Panthers Party activists spearheaded by
Harshdev Singh chairman JKNPP and Yash
Paul Kundal State president Young Panthers staged a protest demonstration at
Exhibition Ground here today.
The NPP
activists assembled near Press Club in the morning and started protest
demonstration. They were raising slogans against the Govt and the Administration.
Harshdev
while addressing the media held the BJP-PDP responsible for making the
progressive RTI Act in the State almost defunct. He divulged that out of the three members of
State Information Commission (SIC), two
including CIC had retired months back and the lone Information Commissioner was
due to retire this month or so but the
Government had remained apathetic to initiate any process for reconstitution of
the said SIC. He said that SIC was in doldrums as as a single Information Commissioner for the
entire state only made a mockery of the SIC.
Admonishing
the laidback attitude shown by the bureaucrats and other Government
functionaries towards the RTI Act in the absence of stern punitive measures,
Mr Singh said that there was plethora of
examples to highlight the contemptuous disregard of the RTI applications of
information seekers by the said officers.
He revealed that it had become a routine affair where the higher
authorities and Administrative department had been forwarding the RTI
applications to hundreds of their subordinates merely to create confusion and
abdicate their responsibility to provide the information. He said that vague
and absurd replies were being given in several others cases only to evade,
avoid and conceal the information.
Mr Kundal
while rebuking the hollow slogans of the Coalition Government of good
governance, transparency and accountability, observed that the solitary
powerful legislation against corruption was being sabotaged by the Government
itself. He said that the Government
apart from paying no heed to the structural shortcomings in the Act and its
execution had also allowed vested interests and regressive elements to defeat
the purpose and essence of the very strong law against the varied malpractices.
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