Privacy continues to be the most frequent excuse for stonewalling the information questions. In Maharashtra, the State Information Commissioner (SIC) directed the public authority to give information to an applicant about the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) report. While the government approached the High Court to reverse the SIC order, the applicant wanted the High Court through a separate writ petition to[Read More...]
A Government Order (GO) is an administrative decision of the government regarding a policy, programme or official activity. The Right to Information Act 005 under Section 4 mandates governments to maintain all their records duly catalogued and indexed in a manner and the form which facilitates the right to information under the Act and facilitate access to such records. Public[Read More...]
Section 4(1)(b) of the RTI Act made it an inescapable duty of every public authority to furnish 17 categories of information on their own, without anybody seeking it. The illegal circular of Telangana govt that no information could be given without permission of principal secretary is illegal; it needs to be withdrawn immediately, as it seriously undermines the transparency and[Read More...]
On August 18, the Supreme Court rejected another attempt of the banks to wriggle out of accountability and responsibility under Right to Information Act. Surprisingly the Central Government joins these petitioners. Whom are they facilitating- the scamsters, big loan defaulters etc? Then why dacoits and way side robbers should be jailed? It is the basic principle of good governance that[Read More...]
The Supreme Court long back stated in a landmark judgment State of Uttar Pradesh v. Raj Narain and Others, “… people of this country have a right to know every public act, everything that is done in a public way by their public functionaries. The Supreme Court long back stated in a landmark judgment State of Uttar Pradesh v.[Read More...]
The reading of Sections 7 and 19 of the RTI Act makes it clear that the RTI Act is a time-bound legislation for effectively exercising the Fundamental Right to Information guaranteed in Article 19 of the Constitution of India. However, the CIC and SICs which are the final appellate authorities under the RTI Act, and are the guardians of the[Read More...]
Prof Dr M Sridhar Acharayalu, who retired as Central Information Commissioner on 20 November 2018. RTI Act is the best enactment, but it is not giving best results in securing the access to public records. Why? The problem is that neither the Central government in respect of CIC nor the State government in respect of SICs, are filling the vacancies[Read More...]
Prof Dr M Sridhar Acharayalu, who retired as Central Information Commissioner on 20 November 2018, wrote an open letter to Ram Nath Kovind, the President of India. In this letter, Prof Acharyulu has raised serious questions on how the government itself had filed almost 1,700 writ petitions against orders passed by information commissioners under Right to Information (RTI) Act.[Read More...]
The Union government proposed setting up of two committees – one to receive and decided on complaints against the Chief Information Commissioner (CIC) and the second one for complaints against the Information Commissioners. (Madabhushi, former Central Information Commissioner, wrote a series of articles on attempts by governments, at the Centre and in States, to subvert RTI. This is one of[Read More...]
