Legally
India: National: Saturday, October 27, 2018.
As
RGNUL Patiala remains one of several national law universities (NLU) that still
do not publish their annual financial statements online, one right to
information (RTI) applicant approached the Central Information Commission (CIC)
against the law school.
The
applicant had asked to see electronic copies of its annual reports in June.
RGNUL responded to the request by stating that it currently maintained only
physical records of annual reports and since they are too voluminous to send by
mail to the applicant, the applicant should visit its campus and inspect the
records on-site.
The
applicant filed a first appeal before RGNUL and eventually approached the CIC
on the ground that it was mandatory under the RTI Act 2005 for the law school
to maintain its annual reports in electronic form and that the applicant would
be greatly inconvenienced by having to travel from a different city to Patiala
to inspect those records.
RGNUL
registrar and first appellate officer for RTI in his 10 October order directed
RGNUL to compute the total cost for mailing the physical records of the annual
reports to the applicant and to provide the records to the applicant on their
payment of that cost.
The
registrar also ruled that RGNUL had not violated the RTI Act by failing to
maintain electronic copies of the annual reports as the law school had a
resource constraint in doing so and the Act provides for this exception.
Nalsar
Hyderabad, NUJS Kolkata, NLU Jodhpur, GNLU Gandhinagar, RMLNLU Lucknow and NLIU
Bhopal have all published annual reports on their websites for several years at
least until 2015-2016, under the RTI section of their official websites, though
some of those are more complete than others.
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