The Central Information Commission (CIC) has advised the Centre to set up a “centralised arrangement” in the various ministries which have several Public Information Officers (PIOs) to deal with the applications filed under the Right to Information Act.
The ‘advisory’ issued by Chief Information Commissioner Satyananda Mishra specifically referred to the difficulty faced by the petitioners when multiple queries were raised in a single RTI application filed before large ministries like Finance (MoF) or Home (MHA).
In fact, the bigger government institutions had more than one PIO, which resulted in the petitioners failing to get the desired information, according to the CIC. While some of the information pertaining to one department may be given, the other is left “unanswered”, he observed.
The CIC came across the problem while dealing with a case in which the appellant had sought information regarding the various actions initiated by the PMO and the MHA in the wake of the terrorist strikes in various parts of the country, including Mumbai.
And the CPIO of the PMO provided some information for the queries. But the other queries were forwarded to the MHA “where the RTI application was originally received,” observed Mishra who dealt with the application. The CIC also noted that several of the RTI queries did not seek factual information. However, as for the remaining pleas, the petitioner was not given the desired information.
“Unfortunately, within the MHA this was dealt with partially by only one of the CPIOs and only some information sent. The rest of the queries, purportedly relating to several other sections of the ministry remained unanswered,” the CIC lamented, noting the manner in which the RTI pleas are casually treated by the bigger ministries.
According to the MHA website, it has as many as 65 CPIOs. Similarly, the MoF has numerous CPIOs, with the Department of Economic Affairs which comes under it having 63 CPIOs including an Appellate Authority.
“This seems to have happened because there is no centralised arrangement in a big ministry like the MHA to monitor the response to multiple queries contained in any single RTI application,” the CIC pointed out.
