Times of India: Ahmedabad: Monday, October 04, 2021.
If you were to seek the official birth and death figures for Ahmedabad city under the Right to Information (RTI) Act, the municipal corporation will outright deny any access to this information.
In the final order of the first appellate authority, dated September 15, the AMC has directed the applicant that the civic body “will not part with the data.” The applicant had only required numbers of total birth and death registrations undertaken by the AMC, which is updated realtime in the municipal registry network system, for the years 2018, 2019 and 2020. The order was passed by appellate authority Bhavin Joshi at the AMC.
After being denied the information, Kalupur applicant Pankaj Bhatt had written to the AMC’s registrar for birth and death that under Section 19 of the birth and death registration Act, 1969 the registrar has to place the yearly death and birth figures in public domain, the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation contrarily believes it to be ‘third party information’.
Bhatt had approached the AMC’s birth and death registry with his RTI application on June 14 for month-wise numbers of death and birth certificates issued and also applications made by the public. This is not the first time that the department has turned down RTI Act requests seeking death figures for Ahmedabad city for 2020. The department cites two Gujarat information commission orders of 2007 and 2008, a Delhi high court order of 2009 to turn down RTI requests on death figures during 2020 Covid year. The AMC has in all turned down four applications making similar requests between October last year and June this year, claims a senior AMC official.
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