Saturday, March 26, 2011

How to avoid people from filing frivolous applications?

THERE IS NO FRIVOLOUS APPLICATION. What is frivolous? My pending water connection could be the most critical issue for me, but it could be treated as frivolous by a bureaucrat. Some vested interests within the bureaucracy have raised this bogey of frivolous applications. Right now, RTI Act does not permit any application to be rejected on the ground that it was frivolous. But some section of bureaucracy want the PIO to be empowered to reject any application if he feels that it was frivolous. If that happens, every PIO will declare every other application to be frivolous and reject it. It would mean a death knell to RTI.
File notings should not be made public as that would prevent honest officers from rendering honest advice?
This is wrong. On the contrary, every officer would now know that whatever he writes on the file would be subject to public scrutiny. This would force him to write things which are in best public interest. Some honest bureaucrats have admitted in private that RTI has helped them immensely in warding off political and other undue influences. Now, the officers simply say that if they did the wrong thing, they might get exposed if someone asked for that information. Therefore, officers have started insisting that the seniors gave directions in writing. The Government is learnt to be contemplating removing file notings from the purview of RTI Act. For the above reasons, it is absolutely essential that file notings should be allowed to be covered under RTI Act.
Civil servant has to make decisions under many pressures and the public will not understand this?
As discussed above, on the contrary, possibility of exposures to illegitimate pressures would reduce.
Government records are not in proper shape. How could RTI be implemented?
RTI would force the system to start maintaining records properly now. Else the officials would face a penalty under the Act
Applications seeking voluminous information should be rejected?
If I seek for some information, which runs into a lakh of pages, I would do that only if I need it because I will have to pay Rs 2 lakhs for that.This is an automatic deterrent. If application were rejected only on this account, the applicant could break his application and file 1000 applications seeking 100 pages through each application, which would not benefit anyone. Therefore, applications should not be rejected only on this pretext.
People should be allowed to seek information only about themselves. They should not be allowed to ask questions about other spheres of governance, totally unrelated to the.
Sec 6(2) of RTI Act clearly says an applicant cannot be questioned why he/she were asking for any information. In any case, RTI flows from the fact that people pay taxes, This money belongs to them and therefore, they have a right to know how their money were being spent and how they were being governed. So, people have a right to know everything about every sphere of governance. They may or may not be directly related to the matter. So, even a person living in Delhi can ask for any information from say, Tamil Nadu.

No comments:

Post a Comment