RTI Information Made Available For All
Financial Express-23.10.2014
( Read my views below)
The political class has generally been wary of the Right to Information (RTI)—remember how political parties, across the spectrum, maintained that they were not covered under the transparency law?
But the Narendra Modi-led government seems to be cut from a different cloth. The government has made it mandatory for all its departments to put replies to all RTI queries on their respective websites. Though such a move was ordered by the UPA government last April, it was never implemented. Thus, for the present government, the move not only gets the optics right with a surge in the transparency quotient but also makes the RTI process less cumbersome for both information-seekers and the authorities giving out the information.
With all information supplied so far put online, duplication of queries can be avoided—information seekers need only scroll through the replies to see if a similar query has been raised and answered. This cuts the processing time out completely and eases the burden on the information officers and their staff.
It also cuts out the massive paper usage incurred in filing the query and replying to these. The move also can help serve as a template for the states to follow. Given there is a provision for suo motu disclosure in the RTI Act, putting the replies online follows as a corollary. The cause of transparency is better served with participation from both sides—the information seeker as well as the information-giver. To this end, those who make queries should not be averse to share minor details.
Link For Above News Of Financial Express
My Comments are submitted below
Government led By Sri Narendra Modi has taken a big step in the field of Right To Information Act by making the information available to all . In a country of 125 crores , it is but natural that the same information may be sought in different format by thousands of persons from various corners of the country. In such position, Officials in various departments entrusted with the task of answering queries put under RTI had to submit replies to all persons and were constrained to work for hours and days and months to complete the same task for all query raisers.
Now when the informations which a department will send to one person will be made available on website of concerned departments of Government of India for sharing with all , the number of RTI queries will drastically come down and may be reduced to 10 percent. This will not only reduce the burden of officials working in government departments, banks and PSUs but also reduce the underlying cost of carrying out this Himalayan Task and save precious time of officials working for answering RTI queries.
Now GOI will have to devise an acceptable modification in RTI Act to prevent false and avoidable use of RTI by non -serious persons and organisations. There are many such persons who use RTI Act just for the sake of raising queries under RTI , they have neither good points to mention in their RTI applications and nor there is any utility of information sought for by such non-serious persons. More than fifty per cent of queries raised under RTI are of no use for anyone including query raiser and mostly irrelevant and meaningless and there is no doubt that queries under RTI in majority of cases are raised only to harass some officials of the organisation or officials of various department of GOI.
I therefore take an opportunity to praise step taken by GOI to make RTI more effective tool to bring about more transparency in the system .
Narendra Modi government takes RTI to another level: All replies to be put
online--Economic Times-23.10.2014
NEW DELHI: It had been expected to dilute the UPA government's showpiece Right
to Information (RTI) Act that had become a scourge of sorts for its ministers and bureaucrats and was even blamed by some as a contributing factor for the policy paralysis during its reign. But the Narendra Modi-led BJP government has done the reverse and taken RTI to quite another level.
Starting next month, all replies given under RTI by ministries will be posted online, available for access to all and not just to persons seeking the information. This will mean unprecedented scale of disclosure and cheer transparency advocates, especially those in the NGO sector with whom this government has had a testy relationship. Until now,
only the person filing the RTI application seeking replies from a ministry or a
government department would get the reply and that too mostly via post.
The Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) on Tuesday issued an official memorandum to all central ministries and departments directing them to take "immediate action" to ensure that "the facility to upload the reply to RTI application and first appeal on the website of the respective ministry or department" may be started
from October 31. Replies to queries will be put up on ministries' website and be available for all to view and not just the person behind the query.
The move has won the government plaudits. Satyanand Mishra, former Chief Information
Commissioner told ET that the step takes transparency under the RTI Act to "just another
level." "It is a very good and welcome step. It will not only improve transparency but also reduce workload of government officials as it will help eliminating possibility of repeated RTI queries on the same issue," Mishra said.
"As far as person whose RTI reply is put online, someone seeking transparency in form of a RTI plea should not have any problem is government shows the same transparency and ..
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