RTI officials within right to info reach!

This is as transparent as it can get. The Central Information Commission (CIC), India’s information watchdog, has decided that complaints against its own information commissioners can now be accessed under Right to Information Act from the commission’s secretary.

Updated on: Aug 17, 2009, 24:40:43 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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This is as transparent as it can get.

The Central Information Commission (CIC), India’s information watchdog, has decided that complaints against its own information commissioners can now be accessed under Right to Information Act from the commission’s secretary.

But the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC), the corruption watchdog, allows providing information on only those corruption cases where the charges have been proved and penal action recommended against an official.

Information watchdog has therefore, quite literally, outwitted the corruption watchdog in transparency.

Chief Information Commissioner Wajahat Habibullah said in a recent order that as the commission is not competent to hold inquiry against an

information commissioner the best way to ensure transparency is to allow inspection of the files pertaining to complaints under RTI.

Habibullah was delivering an order in an appeal filed by Mizubir Rehman of Chhattisgarh.

Rehman’s RTI application, seeking copies of complaint against information commissioner A.N. Tiwari, had been rejected CIC officials.

“In the interest of full accountability in the future complaints received against any information commissioner or chief information commissioner would be maintained at the secretary’s office and allowed inspection under RTI,” Habibullah said in the order.

Rehman was aggrieved with the commission as he was neither provided with the copies of orders issued by Tiwari, which he had sought, nor the copies of the complaints against him.

“The decision of the commission was flawed as the information has to be provided in the form it has been sought,” Habibullah said.

A move by CVC to put information of corruption cases on its website had evoked a strong reaction from the bureaucracy, which claimed that it would amount to indicting a person even before the inquiry has completed. Now, the CVC puts information of officials against whom action has been recommended on its website.

Habibullah, through this order, made CIC among the first institutions in India to allow inspection of complaints against his fellow commissioners.

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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