Prez advised to declare assets

India’s transparency watchdog the Central Information Commission (CIC) wants President Pratibha Devisingh Patil to take a call on whether she wants to declare her assets and that of her family members.

Updated on: Jun 17, 2011, 24:53:44 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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India’s transparency watchdog the Central Information Commission (CIC) wants President Pratibha Devisingh Patil to take a call on whether she wants to declare her assets and that of her family members.

Pushing her to declare assets, Information Commissioner Shailesh Gandhi said Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had voluntarily declared assets of entire cabinet and put it on the website for public viewing. The Union ministers are required to declare assets on annual basis.
Apart from him, members of other Constitutional bodies such as the Election Commission and the Supreme Court and statutory bodies such as the CIC have already declared their assets and put in public domain.

PATIL’S CALL
“In view of this, the President may set a good example in transparency which others could follow,” Gandhi said, while admitting the CIC does not have powers under the RTI Act to ask the President to declare assets. “The Commission cannot pass any direction in this regard, as it does not come within the Commission’s powers as mandated under the RTI Act”.

The order was on an RTI application seeking details of assets of the President and her family which the President’s Secretariat Public Information Officer had rightfully denied.

“It is for the President to take a decision. The PIO’s reply was therefore correct,” Gandhi said.

THE EMREGENCY DAYS
Deciding on another issue in the same RTI application regarding documents related declaring of emergency by the then President Farkhruddin Ali Ahmed, Gandhi was more outright and asked the President’s Secretariat to provide the information.

The Public Information Officer had denied information citing Article 74 (2) of the Constitution. The article debars providing exchange of information between the council of ministers and the President.

Terming emergency as India’s biggest challenge to democracy, the commissioner said the citizens had a right to know the reasons behind imposing emergency while asking the public information officer to provide the information sought by July 10 except advice from Gandhi to Ahmed.

Revelations

On June 1, assets of IAS, IPS and IFS were put on a govt site.

In May, 3 election commissioners placed their assets report on the EC’s website.

In April, the assets of five CICs were put on the govt site.

In May, 2009 PM Manmohan Singh made it mandatory for all Cabinet ministers to declare their assets on annual basis.

In 2009, the Supreme Court judges placed their assets in public domain.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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