RTI Matters- More transparency.

Central Information Commission (CIC), the final appellate authority for Right to information (RTI) Act, has finally moved to bring in more transparency in its working. The transparency watchdog would now upload data of cases received, returned to the applicant and reasons for return on the Commission's website.

After protests from RTI activists and former information commissioners, Chief Information Commissioner Vijai Sharma has asked National Informatics Centre ( NIC), which handles the CIC website, to upgrade the website and upload latest data of appeals and complaints registered at CIC. The instructions have come after a series of reports by ET on how CIC had witnessed a sharp fall of 96% in cases registered over four months.

TThe Commission had registered this sharp fall between July and October when it had started returning cases to applicants citing technical grounds. However, the transparency watchdog had no data on how many appeals and complaints had been returned to the applicants.

Speaking to ET, Sharma said, "We are now correcting this so that people know how many appeals and complaints have been received, registered and returned to the applicant. This data would be available on the website within this week."

Several prominent RTI activists, including former chief information commissioner Wajahat Habibullah and former information commissioner Shailesh Gandhi, have been protesting against the Commission's new practice of returning appeals and complaints on technical grounds.

Earlier, Habibullah had told ETthat this practice goes against the spirit of RTI Act as CIC should aid the applicant in filing an appeal and not discourage him.

A research conducted by Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative had pegged the number of returned cases at over 8,000 in 10 months. However, the research pointed out that the data available on CIC website was not updated and there was no way of finding out exactly how many appeals and complaints had been returned.

RTI activist Lokesh Batra, who has been fighting for transparency in the registration process at CIC, said, "The chief has assured us that the data would be updated and now anybody would be able to access this by filling out the date entries "from" and "to" on the website." Batra said the number of cases returned are more than 10,000 in just four months.

Source:-The Economic Times.