The Orissa high court has likened the bureaucratic ordeal faced by an RTI applicant to Franz Kafka’s book ‘The Trial’, calling out “officialdom and red tapism” that turned the citizen’s quest for information into a nightmarish exercise.
Justice V Narasingh, in a judgment delivered on Thursday, quashed the February 2024 order of the State Information Commissioner that dismissed the second appeal of Bhadrak resident Hemanta Nayak, who had been seeking details on alleged encroachment of government land in his village since 2018.
In an unusually strong language, justice Narasingh drew a parallel between the petitioner’s seven-year struggle for a simple reply and Kafka’s tormented protagonist Josef K, trapped in a senseless legal maze.
“The travail of the petitioner reminds one of the plight of Josef in The Trial, where he faces nightmarish bureaucracy that seems designed to confuse,” the order stated.
The court said the Commission had “mechanically accepted” the state’s contradictory stand — that the petitioner’s representation was both unavailable and yet replied to. “Such patent contradictory stand escaped the scrutiny of the State Information Commission,” the judge observed, warning that if such reasoning were accepted, “the right of a citizen to get information… would be a dead letter.”
The court described the Commission’s approach as “entrapment in officialdom and red tapism, illegitimate tools to deny response to an RTI application,” and held the order to be “the outcome of non-application of mind.”
{{/usCountry}}The court described the Commission’s approach as “entrapment in officialdom and red tapism, illegitimate tools to deny response to an RTI application,” and held the order to be “the outcome of non-application of mind.”
{{/usCountry}}Setting aside the Commission’s order, the court remanded the case back to the SIC to be reheard on merits and directed the Tahasildar of Bhadrak to pay ₹50,000 as costs to Nayak within two months. The state government, it added, may recover the amount from the erring officials.
The case began with a 2017 representation by villagers of Kuansh in Bhadrak district, urging the government to record a local Jalasaya (waterbody) plot in government records and act against alleged encroachers. Despite multiple official correspondences, Nayak received no substantive reply, prompting him to invoke the Right to Information Act in 2018.