Ex-speaker yet to submit office items

Office equipment, domestic appliances and other items amounting to over Rs 6.72 lakh are yet to be recovered from former Delhi Assembly speaker Chaudhary Prem Singh, an RTI query has revealed.

Office equipment, domestic appliances and other items amounting to over Rs 6.72 lakh are yet to be recovered from former Delhi Assembly speaker Chaudhary Prem Singh, an RTI query has revealed.

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Another amount pending against Singh is payment of $ 960 ($ 920 towards hotel charges and $ 40 towards portarage) against accommodation for his son and daughter-in-law when they accompanied him on “an official tour” to US before December 2008, when his term ended.

This amount has been demanded by the Indian Consulate General in New York.

Singh is currently a member of the legislative assembly.

The Right to Information (RTI) application filed by activist Subhash Agrawal revealed that except for stopping salary from December 2008 onwards, the secretariat has not done anything else.

When the Indian Consulate General’s demand was conveyed to Singh, he simply refused to pay up stating that “his tour was an official one and his expenditure towards it was required to be paid by the Assembly speaker,” the RTI answer said.

The items pending against him include three computers (Rs 95,903), two printers (Rs 28,700), an UPS system (Rs 39,436) as office material apart from a videocassette recorder (Rs 12,500), an officer table (Rs 12,548), vacuum cleaner (Rs 6,990) and a television set (Rs 59,390) among others.

The secretariat officials first avoided replying to the RTI queries stating — which was evident from the file notings — the information may be used for some other purpose then expected in the public interest as envisaged in the RTI Act.
However, after Agrawal complained to the CIC, the authorities complied.