RTIGATE-A
15 YEAR OLD SCAM
P M Ravindran, raviforjustice@gmail.com
It is 15 years since the
Right to Information Act was introduced as another piece of legislation, only
to cheat the masses once again. Touted as a sunshine act, as a panacea for
corruption and introduce accountability of the public servants to the public,
it has grown into one of the biggest, yet unrecognized, scams over the last 15
years.
Before we proceed further,
let us do some back of envelope calculations.
Each information
commission is authorized one Chief Information Commissioner (CIC) and a maximum
of 10 Information Commissioners (ICs). There is the Central Information
Commission (Central IC) and 29 state information commissions (SICs) with say,
an average of 6 ICs, including the CIC. That makes the total number of ICs,
including the CICs, as 180.
Each information
commissioner can dispose of, say, a very conservative 10 appeals per working
day and there are 220 working days per year, then each IC is expected to clear
2200 appeals in a year. So, between all the ICs, in 15 years the number of
appeals disposed of should be around 59,40,000.
The RTI Act provides for
imposing a penalty @ Rs 250/- per day of delay in providing the information
sought, subject to a maximum of Rs 25000/- on a defaulting Public Information
Officer (PIO). Presuming that no appeal would have been filed unless there had
been shortfalls in providing the complete information sought and that by the
time an appeal is disposed of by an IC this maximum limit would have been
reached the total penalty due would be a whopping Rs 148,500,000,000 (14,850
Cr).
Now consider the average
cost, just in terms of his/her pay and perks only, to exchequer of an IC to be
around Rs 3 lakhs per month till 7th Central Pay Commission and 5
lakhs per month since 01 Jan 2016. That would be Rs 11,880,000,000 (1,188 Cr).
To my mind the total of
the above figures, that is Rs 16,038 Crores is the total loss to the exchequer
over the last 15 years. This does not include the cost of the establishment,
that is the fixed and movable assets, the salary and allowances of the other
employees, consumables etc.
Do I mean that all the 2nd
appeals were deserving the full penalty to be imposed? Yes, of course. Given
that even in cases of decisions directing the defaulting Public Information
Officers to provide information, the ICs have been delinquent in penalizing
them shows the extent of arbitrariness, waywardness and corruption involved.
I, along with 12 activists,
were put in the dock when we staged a protest outside the venue where the then
CIC of Kerala SIC was to address a seminar on RTI. Obviously, the detention and
prosecution were illegal and misuse of the authority by the police at the
behest of the CIC. That aside, demands of the protesters were for the
information commissions to stop:
- denial of democratic rights of citizens
- violation of laws
- corruption
- extravaganza
The
issues highlighted included:
All public authorities
including the Information Commission should disclose information as required by
Sec 4(1)(b)
Collect the penalty
prescribed by law for the delay in publishing the information
Dispose of the complaints
and appeals received by the Commission in a time bound manner as prescribed by
the law
Stop the misinformation
being disseminated by the Commission
The Commission which has
an air conditioned office, computers, luxury cars and more than the required number
of employees should not claim that it has no facilities (the 4 commissioners
who need 15 employees have 35, of the 1263 cases filed in the Commission
between January 2006 and May 2007 only 649 have been disposed of, and the
amount spent by the Commission during this period was Rs 2.5 crores of the tax
payers’ money)
Stop spreading lies like
some people are threatening the government employees in the name of the RTI Act
Isn’t the scope for
misusing the law available only for the information commissioners? For example,
to accept a bribe of Rs 15000/- from a defaulting public servant who should be
penalized with Rs 25000/- and fail to penalize him is available only to the
information commissioners.
The copy of the leaflet,
in Malayalam, distributed during the protest on 18 Dec 2007, along with its
translation in English, is available at
https://www.slideshare.net/raviforjustice/rti-protest181207leafletmal-n-eng.
Horror of horrors, the
situation has only gone from bad to worse over the years.
To elucidate further, even
the information commissions have not complied with the mandated suo moto
disclosures listed in Sec 4(1)(b).
At their website, http://keralasic.gov.in/,
under Right to Information, Kerala SIC has only provided the details of their
PIO and their First Appellate Authority (FAA).
Under Disclosures, there
is a Menu where the 1st option is Disclosure u/s 4(1)(b). Here what
has been provided is a list under the heading Private Journey Payment (for the
period 2011 June to 2014 July).
The Central IC, which had
correctly disclosed this information, sub section wise, at their website in the
early years, has now disclosed only partial information. For example, the
details of employees and their monthly remuneration have not been disclosed as
required by Sec 4(1)(b)(ix) and Sec 4(1)(b)(x) of the RTI Act. What has been
left out is the exact number of employees in each category. And instead of the
exact remuneration being given, only the levels as per the 7th
Central Pay Commission scales have been provided.
While the Act has provided
mandatory time frames for the PIOs and FAAs to reply and for the applicant to
file appeals, it has not provided any time frame for the ICs to dispose of the
appeals (as well as complaints) submitted to them. But there is a provision,
and only one provision to Sec 7(1), which prescribes a priority for providing
information. It says: where the
information sought for concerns the life or liberty of a person, the same shall
be provided within forty-eight hours of the receipt of the request. By
extension, it follows that the appeals, including the 2nd appeal,
must be disposed of within 48 hours each. And, in the rest it must be on first come, first served basis. But even
that is violated, as will be evident when I present data on disposal of cases.
Regarding disposal of
cases, under the option ‘Orders’ in the main menu, the Kerala SIC has provided
the information at its website under different years from 2010 to 2019 and
another option ‘Orders in English’.
As on 30 Jul 2019, for
2019, the orders have been provided against various ICs as follows:
Vinson M Paul, CIC (For January
to April 2019):
He had disposed of 312
cases between January and March 2019. And 32 in April 2019. To understand the arbitrary
and wayward (not on first come first served basis) manner of disposal, the
April data was analyzed, to co-relate the year, in which the application was
originally submitted, with the appeals and complaints disposed of in that
month. The result is:
2nd appeal : 2012-3, 2013-9, 2018-10, 2019-1, Total- 23
Complaints : 2013-2, 2014-1, 2018-1, 2019-5, Total- 09
The following are deficiencies
noted in the above data made available:
-
Information about
the disposals since May 2019 is not available.
-
The
orders/decisions, themselves are not accessible in all cases. While the orders
up to March 2019 appears as hyperlinks, for April 2019 it is just a list. But
even in some random cases of these hyperlinks I have checked from the January
list, some have returned the message ‘Forbidden. You don't have permission to
access /images/stories/sic/decisions/orders2019/cic/ on this server.’
-
The orders have
been uploaded in Word format and not Portable Document Format (PDF) and hence cannot
be read unless the same fonts are installed in your system. This problem does
not arise with PDF.
If this be the case of the
CIC, the data about other ICs is even more shocking.
Vivekanandan, IC (Available for 2018 only.)
2nd appeal : 2016-6, 2017-5, 2018-2, Total- 13
Complaints : 2013-6, 2014-2, 2017-3, Total- 11
Somanathan Pillai, IC (Available
for 2019 only, not month wise but separately for Malayalam and English. The
figures given below includes both)
2nd appeal : 2010-1, 11-1, 12-1, 13-4, 14-13, 16-1,
17-2, 18-14, 19-7, Total- 44
Complaints : 2010-6, 15-1, 17-3, 18-2, 19-3, Total-
15
Sudhakaran, IC (Available
for 2019 only.)
2nd appeal : 2015-8, 16-1, 17-3, 18-4, Total- 16
Complaints : C: 2015-1, 18-1 Total- 02
Sreelatha, IC (For January
and Feb 2019 only.)
2nd appeal : 2015-3, 17-5, 18-4, Total- 12
Complaints : 2017-8, 18-3, Total- 11
While Sudhakaran’s list of
cases disposed have hyperlinks to the orders/decisions which are in PDF the
list of cases disposed of by the others are just that, mere lists with no
access to the decisions themselves.
It may be noted that while
the figures about disposal do convey the casual approach of the ICs, the
perusal of the orders themselves would reveal the preposterous nature of the decisions.
When the decisions are devoid of reasons the least that should be obvious
should be the dereliction of duty and/or incompetence of the CIC. If anybody
suspects corruption, they cannot also be blamed.
Another piece of
information available at the website is that of the expenditure incurred by the
Commission annually, for the period from 2005-06 to 2013-14. It has steadily
increased from Rs 1.0127 Cr to 2.9474 Cr. No need to ask: what about the
expenditures thereafter?
As per a list, updated on 11/10/2018,
of 664 penalties imposed by the Commission, the first penalty, of Rs 3500/- was
imposed by the Commission on 08/01/2007. The last, Rs 1000/- was imposed on
18/07/2018.
The total penalty imposed,
as per the summary provided is: Rs 44,51,815/-; the total received is
only Rs 28,56,353/- and the High Court, Kerala has stayed penalties totaling Rs
4,88,387/-. Again, no questions on the missing Rs 11,06,893/-.
Now, when penalized PIOs
take up the matter with high courts they are required to do so in their own
personal capacity. This is not only logically correct but has been held so by Punjab
and Haryana High Court as per a report in the Indian Express, datelined 04 Nov
2010.
Since, the Information
Commission must be a respondent in such cases, do the commissions keep a record
of such cases? At least the Kerala SIC does not.
This is in violation of
Sec 4(1)(a) of the RTI Act which mandates that ‘Every public authority shall maintain
all its records duly catalogued and indexed in a manner and the form which
facilitates the right to information under this Act.
In a similar issue, of
maintaining a register to track compliance of their decisions, the Central IC
had decided that a Register of Non
Compliance will be opened, which will be processed by the Office of Secretary,
CIC and on conclusion of the complaint, the complaint will either be closed or
registered as a complaint for hearing under the appropriate sub sec. of Sec.
18(1) and proceeded upon by the Bench of the Information Commissioner
concerned. (Refer decision dated 11/06/2009 in Commission in their case
file no. CIC/WB/C/2008/00859.)
In a 5-part series on the
subject ‘RTI: Exposing the traitors among public servants’ published here
between 27 and 31 Mar 2018 the details of the RTI Act including its
shortcomings, the lapses in implementation and the way forward had been analyzed.
Please read them at
http://www.vijayvaani.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?aid=4626
http://www.vijayvaani.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?aid=4627
http://www.vijayvaani.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?aid=4628
http://www.vijayvaani.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?aid=4629
http://www.vijayvaani.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?aid=4630
There is one small but
major change that has happened since then.
Through an amendment to
the Act, published in the Gazette on 01 August 2019 and the rules published
thereunder on 24 Oct 2019, the tenure and pay of the ICs, including the CICs
have been changed.
Essentially,
the tenure of all these public servants have been reduced to 3 years from 5
years.
The pay of the CIC of the
Central IC has been reduced to Rs 2,50,000. Earlier it had been the same as that of the Chief Election Commissioner.
The pay of the ICs of the
Central IC has been reduced to Rs 2,25,000. Earlier it had been the same as that
of the Election Commissioner.
The pay of the CICs and
ICs of the SICs have been fixed at Rs 2,25,000/-. Earlier it had been the same
as that of an Election Commissioner and Chief Secretary to the State Government,
respectively.
I have been maintaining
that the job of an IC is simpler than that of a munsif in our judiciary. Hence
even this level of pay is an avoidable drain on the exchequer.
But there has been severe
criticism of this amendment from many RTI activists themselves. For example,
Venkatesh Nayak of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, has commented in
the Economic Times of 25 Oct 2019 (Govt notifies RTI rules; CIC tenure cut to 3
yrs, govt to decide salary, other perks) that ‘As the parity between the Information Commissions and the Election
Commission of India has been downgraded to babu-level, it is highly unlikely
that in a situation where the rule of law is not a very strongly embedded value
in the bureaucracy, that senior babus in the administration will ever be hauled
up before the Information Commissions for not complying with the provisions of
the RTI Act’. Of course, everyone has a right to his opinion. But he seems
to have forgotten that even P V Narasimha Rao, as the Prime Minister of this
nation then, had been doing the rounds of trial courts at least in three cases
in which he had been an accused- the Lakhubhai Pathak case, the JMM bribery
case and the St Kitts case. (The analysis of these cases is itself an interesting
study, but for a later occasion.)
Another report in the
Print dated 21 May 2020 ( 21 of 29 state information commissions did not hold
any RTI hearings during lockdown) The study by voluntary groups Satark Nagrik
Sangathan and Centre for Equity Studies stated that only the Central IC and the
SICs of Arunachal Pradesh, Haryana, Manipur, Punjab and Telangana had made
provisions for taking up urgent matters
or those related to life and liberty during the period. But then wasn’t the
apex court itself among the first to decide that it was a non-essential service
during the lockdown?
05 Aug 2020.
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