Hindustan Times: New Delhi: Tuesday, August 18, 2020.
The working of the state information
commissions (SICs) dropped from 80% in June to 44% in July, a survey by the
Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) has found.
The CHRI is an organisation working
towards greater transparency in governance. The survey was conducted by
contacting each of 28 SICs across the country via phone calls and emails and
tracking their websites. The first survey (in April) had found that none of the
SICs were working, but during the second survey (in May) 12 SICs had opened
their offices. However, only eight were conducting hearings. According to its
third rapid telephonic survey, the organisation found the SICs that had started
attending to litigants in June had stopped by July.
“We found, out of the 29 Information
Commissions nearly 80% (23 Commissions) had resumed hearings during Unlock1.0
starting on 1st June, 2020,” says CHRI’s report. The Central Information
Commission began functioning in mid-April.
“We continued to track the working of
information commissions during the Unlock 2.0 phase also as several state
governments had imposed local lockdowns to contain the spread of Covid-19. Once
again we surveyed the websites of the state information commissions (SICs) and
made phone calls to their offices to ascertain whether local lockdowns have
affected their work. This time we found, only 44% information commissions under
the Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005, i.e., 13 out of 29 Commissions were
conducting hearings during Unlock 2.0 starting 1st July,” the report adds.
They also found that the SICs of
Bihar, Goa, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Tripura and Uttar Pradesh continue to
function without a chief information commissioner.
SIC officials say that reason for the
hearings getting stopped in July is the exponential spike in Covid-19 cases
across the country, with nearly 60,000 cases being added every day. However,
the inability to conduct the hearings has drawn criticism from social activists
for denying people access to information.
According to an information
commissioner (IC) in Bihar who did not wish to be named, the reason hearings
could not be conducted is because the state had limited public transport.
“There has been a steep rise in cases
across Bihar,” the IC said. “Most of the people could not be present for
physical hearings due to the lack of public transport.”
However, the IC added, that virtual
hearings had been held using WhatsApp for the litigants who agreed to them.
“Only 25% of the litigants who come to
the commission use WhatsApp,” the Bihar IC said. “We reached out to all of
them, either by text or on WhatsApp to see if they’d want a virtual hearing.
Some agreed to it, but many also opposed it. We even tried Google Meet and
Microsoft Teams to hold virtual hearings.”
The Bihar IC added that they had also
written to the state government to make arrangements to hold the hearings using
NIC software. “It is the health of the litigants and our officials that was
kept in mind when we decided to reduce the number of physical hearings.”
According to social activist and
programme head at CHRI Venkatesh Nayak, the SICs were denying people access to
information under the garb of Covid-19.
“It is very distressing to know the
SICs haven’t resumed work,” he told Hindustan Times. “They have once again gone
back to shutting the door to information. There must be over 2 lakh cases
pending across the country. This is the time they should be most active.”
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