Times of India: Ahmedabad: Friday,
04 September 2020.
For five
months now, Covid has been one of the reasons many RTI applications were not
heard or being processed by government departments and were left piling up. The
civic body and the district administration offices are just a few examples. A
recent high court order has come to the rescue.
On June
30, the HC told the Gujarat government that “citizens are being put to grave
hardship and inconvenience for want of video conferencing facilities.” The HC
instructed the state government to ensure that such facilities be introduced so
that citizen’s grievance are heard via video conferencing.
The
general administration department has now instructed various departments of the
urban local bodies to ensure that all pending hearings pertaining to RTI
applications and other pending hearings are conducted via video conferencing. A
letter to this effect was also sent to the additional chief secretary, urban
development, Mukesh Puri, on July 22. Following the intimation, municipal
commissioner Mukesh Kumar on Thursday wrote an office order to all municipal
zonal offices to conduct all forms of proceedings, appeals and processing of
applications made by citizens through video conferencing.
It was
following the oral order of Justice S H Vora on June 30 in the case of Ajitsinh
Jadeja vs The State that the office orders were executed across all government
departments. A similar problem was also witnessed when it came RTI applications
pending in district administration offices, including civil supplies and survey
offices.
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