AP at bottom of performance list in RTI implementation, Anjali Bharadwaj at Amaravati

 

                                  It has failed to appoint State Information Commission

                                             The Hindu,  Dated 17th November 2018

 

Failure to appoint a full-fledged State Information Commission (SIC) under the Right to Information (RTI) Act has put Andhra Pradesh at the bottom of the performance list at the national-level.
A report card, released jointly by the Delhi-based Satark Nagrik Sangathan (SNS) and the Centre for Equity Studies (CES) in March 2018, shows non-adherence of the clauses of the Act mainly due to the State government’s failure to put in place a full-fledged Commission.
The term of the last SIC in the composite State was over on May 17 last year and there has been a gap of 18 months for the constitution of a Commission for AP.
The SIC office set up at Mangalagiri in August last has been dysfunctional. Following several pleas by RTI activists and members of the civil society and a directive by the High Court, the government appointed former IFS officer M. Ravi Kumar, former IPS officer B. V. Ramana Kumar and advocate Katta Janardhana Rao as SICs but there was no mention of a State Chief Information Commissioner (SCIC). Mr. Ravi Kumar has been asked to be the in-charge SCIC.
“But there is no such provision in the law. Technically, tomorrow the orders given by these Commissioners can be challenged. This is a mockery of the whole exercise,” says Anjali Bhardwaj, co-convenor of the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information (NCPRI) and founder of SNS.
The State in the past had been one of the well-functioning RTI regimes but now the institution has been reduced to a farce, she rues, pointing to the Section 4 of the RTI Act that mandates governments to give information pro-actively through websites and other means. “If this does not happen, the Information Commission comes in. But when there is no Commission, it is tantamount to breakdown of the RTI regime,” says Ms. Bharadwaj.
“The delay in the appointment is a huge setback because even if Commissioners are appointed later, it will take a long time for things to come back on the track by which time, people seeking justice will lose hope,” says Amrita Johri, one of the co-ordinators of the published report.
In the columns of the report, it says “Information Denied’ to queries on the number of applications registered, disposed, number of pending applications as on October 31 in 2017 and estimated time for disposal.
The State has also not been able to answer queries on the amount of penalty imposed and the percentage of disposed cases. A website is accessible but the last annual report available is of 2013.
The report concludes that AP has provided 0% of information sought under the RTI Act.