Two fined for holding back info

A Central government official had to part with Rs 12,500 from her salary for blocking information to a citizen, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Published on: Nov 15, 2006, 02:10:00 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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It does not pay to deny information under the Right to Information Act. A Central government official learnt that the hard way when she had to part with Rs 12,500 from her salary for blocking information to a citizen.

The Central Information Commission (CIC) had found KD Bansor, an additional public information officer and an under-secretary in the National Commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, and her colleague Tikam Singh, a section officer, guilty of delay in divulging information and harassing an applicant, Mukesh Kumar.

On January 1, Kumar, a resident of Ghaziabad, had sought information on the action taken by the Commission on his representation on the ministry of steel. Kumar had wanted to know the number of people from reserved categories who had been promoted in different public sector units under the steel ministry.

However, the SC/ST Commission took over four months to inform Kumar that they did not have the statistics he wanted. Kumar sought an inquiry into the Commission's failure to maintain these records.

When the Commission failed to provide the relevant information even after a CIC order, Information Commissioner OP Kejriwal invoked the penalty clause in September against the two officials. They were fined Rs 25,000 — the maximum amount under the RTI Act.

Last week, the SC/ST Commission sent the CIC a cheque of Rs 12,500 that was deducted from Bansor’s salary. But the fine could not be recovered from Singh's salary as he has since been transferred to the ministry of social welfare and justice. However, the Commission said they had asked Singh’s new ministry to make sure they deduct his salary.

Email: chetan@hindustantimes.com

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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