The government may have refrained from amending the Right to Information Act after Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s intervened, but it has found a subtler way to refuse information.
The government may have refrained from amending the Right to Information Act after Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s intervened, but it has found a subtler way to refuse information.
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Public authorities can refuse information in a particular format on the ground that “it would disproportionately divert the resources of a public authority” or that it “can be detrimental to the safety or preservation of the records”.
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The Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT), the nodal office for RTI law, has said the section 7 (9) of the RTI law gives right to a public authority to deny information if it leads to diversion of resources disproportionately.
In a circular issued this week, the department also rules out the possibility of the public authority asking the RTI applicant to pay for diversion of public resources to get the information in the sought format.
Seeking a charge for diversion of resources was often used by Central Public Information Officers (CPIOs) to deter RTI applicants. In one case, the Delhi Police had asked for Rs 20,000 for providing some information.
While that has been termed illegal, the DoPT has provided a more lethal tool to CPIOs —that is to deny information. The department said information sought in a particular format can be refused.
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The circular was issued in response to transparency watchdog Central Information Commission asking the government to frame rules for charging fees for providing information that is priced and towards mailing charges.
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The circular was issued in response to transparency watchdog Central Information Commission asking the government to frame rules for charging fees for providing information that is priced and towards mailing charges.
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“The government has not considered it desirable to charge fees towards expenditure involved in mailing information or overhead expenditure,” the circular said.
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.
