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New Delhi, March 7: MORE than two years after Delhi’s Right to Information Act was enacted, four MCD officials have got the dubious distinction of being the first to be issued show-cause notices for ‘‘delayed reply’’; ‘‘deflecting the issue’’; and ‘‘failure to set up systems...for the public to access reasonable information within time.’’
The officials — K K Mishra, deputy commissioner, P Bansal, superintending engineer, Rajesh Wadhwa, executive engineer, and Chandan Singh, assistant engineer — posted in South Zone have been asked to submit individual replies by March 31 stating why a fine may not be imposed on them.
Under RTI, an official may be asked to pay a fine of Rs 50 daily for each additional day’s delay after the stipulated 30 days since an application is filed, with a ceiling of Rs 500. The amount is to be deducted from the official’s salary. The Public Grievances Commission gave the order on February 28, 2005, in a case involving the MCD and three East Of Kailash residents — Chitra Garg, Dharamvir Singh and Keshav Jain.
The residents had, under the RTI Act, asked for information on repair of roads and cleaning of drains in the area between 2001-04 on December 12 last year. ‘‘The information sought requires the details from different stock and labour registers and it is very cumbersome and if any particular information is required for a particular reach, same may be specified by the applicant and same can be provided on demand,’’ said the reply.
The PGC order, pointing out that the application could have been more specific, observed that ‘‘it cannot be said that the information asked for was irrelevant...’’
PGC Chairperson Shailaja Chandra says, ‘‘About 15-20 cases have been dealt with in the past three months and in some departmental action/penalty has also been recommended.’’ The show-cause notice in the present case, she explained, was necessitated by the absence of the officials at the hearing.
An interesting trend, points out East of Kailash G-block resident Tandra Ghosh, is that though no reply to an RTI application may be received, ‘the work starts getting done.’’ Keshav Jain, one of the applicants, agrees. ‘‘Within days of our approaching the PGC, they did some patchwork in some of the back lanes and came to me and said if the RTI application could be hushed up. After the PGC order, they repeated their plea.’’ Dimple Chawla, who has sought information on the only park in the area, doesn’t care. ‘‘We will not rest till we know how the tax-payer’s money has been utilised.’’ |