Times of India: N.K. Agrawal: Ramgardh: Sunday, November 03, 2024.
RTI activist Binu Kumar Mahto of Raipura village under the Gola block, who shot to fame for paying Rs 1.49 lakh to the block development office (BDO) under the RTI Act 2005 to procure information, is going to contest the assembly polls from the Ramgarh constituency on a BSP ticket. Ramgarh will go to polls in Phase 2 on November 20. Thirty-three-year-old Mahto will join other key contenders in the constituency, including outgoing MLA Sunita Choudhary of Ajsu-P, former Congress MLA Mamta Devi and newbie Paneshwar Mahto of the newly formed Jharkhand Krantikari Loktantra Morcha (JKLM). Mahto gained recognition for his unprecedented RTI activism when he paid Rs 1.49 lakh to obtain 74,500 pages of information from the Gola BDO.
The information pertained to projects executed under the 14th and 15th Finance Commissions between 2020 and 2023. The case drew attention when Mahto declined to collect the documents, stored in five sacks at the block office, insisting on postal delivery as per the RTI Act 2005 provisions. The authorities eventually delivered the certified documents to his residence in Raipura village.
“I’ve been analysing these 74,500 pages of information for the past year,” Mahto said, adding, “Cross-verifying this data with ground reality across various panchayats of the Gola block could take more than five years.” Mahto filed the RTI with the public information officer-cum-BDO on May 6, 2023. Mahto said he went to the block office on May 24, 2023, to find out the status of his application. The then BDO-cum-public information officer, Santosh Kumar, informed him in an official letter the same day that Mahto had to pay Rs 1.49 lakh, at the rate of Rs 2 per photocopy, and agreed to provide the information within 25 days of depositing the money. After initial reluctance, Mahto paid the amount on June 7, 2023, after which the BDO asked him to collect the pages stored in sacks from the office.
Mahto, however, refused, saying under the RTE, the information should be delivered to him through the post office. With no option left, the BDO dropped off the sacks in an SUV at Mahto’s house on July 11, 2023. The incident turned into a spectacle and was watched by scores of villagers and videographed by block officials, who made Mahto sign a receipt for the photocopies. Later, Mahto had said he wanted a refund, saying the information provided was irrelevant to what he had sought under the RTI Act and was delayed by more than two months. The activist had also claimed that he was forced to sign the receipt and that a rough count put the number of pages at only about 48,000. “I will move court if the block office refuses to return my money,” Mahto had said then.
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