Times of India: Chandigarh: Thursday,
October 06, 2016.
Haryana State
Information Commission has ordered an inquiry against officers of a sugar mill
who not only denied complete information under the RTI Act, but also
"humiliated" an applicant who had gone to inspect the documents on
the orders of the panel.
State
information commissioner Hemant Atri has asked additional chief secretary of
cooperation department to look into the role of officers of the Panipat
Cooperative Sugar Mill and fix responsibility for delay in supplying
information under the RTI Act. The panel has also recommended disciplinary
action against the erring mill officials.
A Panipat
resident, B S Kundu, had sought inspection of some documents of the sugar mill
by filing an application under RTI Act on December 10, 2015. But the inspection
could not be carried out despite the directions of the commission twice on one
pretext or the other.
The
commission has descrived it as a "classical case" of administrative
apathy and red-tapism at its best wherein the officers did not even bothered to
respond to an RTI application till almost nine months of filing the
application. "It has also come to the light as per the statement of a few
state public information officers that at the behest and verbal orders of the
then first appellate authority (FAA), the information was not furnished,"
mentioned Atri in the order.
.JPG)
.JPG)
