CIC raps CAG over transfer of RTI petition
For a change, the Comptroller and Auditor General had to face an ‘audit’ of its compliance with the provisions of Right to Information Act as the Central Information Commission took a strong note of an unmindful transfer of an RTI application to CAG’s “field office” despite the principal audit institution having the relevant information.
Chief Information Commissioner(CIC) Satyananda Mishra, while deciding an appeal against the CAG, asked the Central Public Information Officer ( CPIO) to be careful in future and not to transfer RTI applications without first checking the facts. The transparency panel also did not appreciate the way suo motu disclosure of information has been done by the CAG, as was revealed in the case at hand. The appellant in his query had asked for a number of information regarding the compliance of Section 4(1) (b) of the Right to Information (RTI) Act, which makes it mandatory for every public authority to disclose basic information on its own to the public. The query made to the CAG also sought the details of the transfer of officials in the field offices of the CAG in the past three years. However, the CPIO of the CAG had transferred the application to the office of the Principal Auditor General in Jharkhand which returned it back to the CAG office. The CIC completely agreed with appellant’s submission that his application was wrongly transferred to a field office when the information was available with the CAG’s office itself. “There is much merit in this objection. The information had been sought from the office of the CAG and there was no possible reason why the RTI application was transferred to a field office, in the first place,” Mishra noted in his order. Coming to the information sought in the RTI query, the chief of the transparency panel again seemed to agree with appellant’s claim that CAG’s website does not seem to disclose the link regarding the consolidated disclosure of information. The appellant pointed out before the Commission that on the CAG website, there was no specific link where one could find out all the rules, regulations, circulars, guidelines and instructions issued by the CAG, from time to time. “This, incidentally, is a clear requirement under Section 4(1)(b),” underlined the CIC.
Ordering the CPIO of the CAG to inform the appellant about the exact links in the website where the desired information could be found out, Mishra further asked the supreme auditor of the country to furnish the details of all transfers ordered during last three years “including the copies of the transfer orders unless of course these transfer orders run into hundreds of pages, in which case, the consolidated list of transfers, should be provided.”