LiveMint: Shreya Nandi: Abhijit Bhaskar: New delhi: Saturday, November 28, 2020.
CIC had last month issued strongly-worded show-cause notices to central public information officers of MeitY, the National eGovernance Division and NIC and asked them why a penalty under the RTI Act should not be slapped on them for obstructing information
The central information commission (CIC) has dropped the show-cause notice issued to the ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY) and said it will not slap any penalty on it in connection with the Aarogya Setu-RTI complaint case.
The CIC had last month issued strongly-worded show-cause notices to central public information officers (CPIOs) of MeitY, the National eGovernance Division (NeGD) and National Informatics Centre (NIC) and asked them why a penalty under the RTI Act should not be slapped on them for obstructing information and saying that information related to the app was available in the public domain.
They were also asked to appear before the CIC on 24 November. NeGD and NIC come under the administrative control of MeitY.
The notice was issued in response to an RTI query on the origin of the Aarogya Setu app, details on the proposal and approvals of the app, along with names of companies and government agencies involved in developing the app.
The CIC has decided to dispose of the complaint and not impose any fine as “no malafide or intention to conceal information" has been found in the responses of the CPIOs. “The show-cause notice proceedings are dropped and the complaint too is disposed of accordingly," said a CIC order seen by Mint.
On Tuesday, government representative Shiloma Rao admitted that the RTI application was handled “poorly" because of lack of coordination between different public information officers.
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