Refusal to comply with RTI: Prez staff may face action

Central Information Commissioner threatens to initiate action under IPC against officials of the Rashtrapati Bhawan and DoPT for not obeying his orders, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Jan 12, 2008, 23:41:33 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Central Information Commissioner Wajahat Habibullah has threatened to initiate action under IPC against officials of the Rashtrapati Bhawan and Department of Personnel and Training for not obeying his orders.

Habibullah had asked Rashtrapati Bhawan's Central Public Information Officer Nitin Wakankar to provide file notings to RTI applicant SS Bamra, an employee in the President's Secretariat. Bamra had sought information about relaxation given in promotion to his colleagues.

What apparently irked Habibullah was that Wakankar had sought the advice of the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) on his order on whether to provide a copy of the file notings to Bamra. The department informed Wakankar that it had not taken a final view on whether the file notings were part of the information defined in RTI law or not.

When Bamra approached him, Wakankar said there were no further file notings to be provided. This was despite Habibullah specifying that the file notings were to be provided to Bamra.

Wakankar's senior in Rashtrapati Bhawan and Appellate Authority for RTI Rasika Choubey washed her hands off the controversy saying she has no comments to offer and the action on Habibullah's order was required to be taken by Wakankar.

And, when the case for non-compliance of Habibullah's order was listed for hearing in December, Wakankar and Fayaz Ahmed Kidwai, a deputy secretary in Rashtrapati Bhawan, who assisted him in the case, failed to appear. Bamra was present.

From the sequence of events, Habibullah reached the conclusion that there was a deliberate violation of his orders.

What annoyed him further was Wakankar's insistence that the information provided was complete, even though it was incomplete. "Denial of information made knowingly appears to be rather malafide," Habibullah said in his order.

Habibullah said that by disobeying orders of the commission, the functionaries of President's Secretariat and the Department of Personnel and Training appear to have committed offences punishable under various sections of Indian Penal Code for not providing information to a public servant, obstructing a public servant from discharging his or her duties and disobeying orders issued by a public servant.

The punishment for these offences is simple imprisonment upto six months.

In a showcause notice issued to Wakankar, Kidwai and PK Misra, the central public information officer of the personnel department, Habibullah has sought replies from them why action should not be taken under the penal provisions and section 20 (1) of RTI Act.

The section is about imposing penalty and disciplinary action against officials for not providing information.

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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