Hindustan Times: Sadguru Pandit: Mumbai: Friday, January 19, 2018.
Activists who asked for the information through an application under RTI said that the department has not made the data available in public domain in the past ten years.
The state health department has been pulled up by Central Information Commission (CIC), for not providing data about deaths due to malnutrition and infant-death cases.
Activists who asked for the information through an application under the Right to Information act (RTI) said that the department—while violating the norms of CIC, has not made the data available in public domain in the past ten years.
RTI activist Chetan Kothari had filed two separate queries in September 2017, based on the death of 1,317 deaths of children in BRD medical college Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh and 187 deaths of children in Nashik Civil Hospital in the same year.
However, as the department failed to submit the data, two appeals were filed by Kothari, with CIC on October 10, 2017 and November 13, 2017 in order to avail the statistics.
Kothari said that during the hearing of both the appeals, none of the public health officials were present to give any explanation about their inability to submit the statistics.
“This clearly shows that the state is hiding the data from public eye. Moreover, as per section 4.1 (B) of RTI, 2005, the state was supposed to make this data available on their website, but they have failed to do so,” said Kothari.
.JPG)
.JPG)
