Bhopal, Mar 4 (PTI) The Madhya Pradesh Information Commission on Friday asked the state government to take necessary steps to ensure compliance with Section 4 of the RTI Act which mandates suo motu disclosure of information held by all public authorities, flagging violation of the provision by the offices of district collectors (DC).
In an order, Information Commissioner Rahul Singh said the commission was disappointed to see that all the DC offices in Madhya Pradesh have been in continued violation of Section 4 of the RTI Act for almost two decades.
According to the Act, the proactive disclosures of 17-point manual that had to be made public within 120 days of its enactment is still missing after 17 years of its existence, he said.
During the course of hearing in many appeals, it has been found that the information sought in the RTI application belong to the category of disclosures under Section 4 and therefore should have been publicly available to the citizens, Singh said.
The DC offices that are established for directly connecting with the people and working for them are putting their citizens through the tedious process of filing an RTI application instead of proactively disclosing all the basic information, citizens charter being one of them, he said.
The State Information Commission (SIC) directed the Principal Secretary of the General Administration Department to take necessary steps to ensure compliance with Section 4 of the RTI Act by all the DC offices in Madhya Pradesh, Singh said.
The SIC granted three months for the compliance of this decision.
However, in case of non-compliance of Section 4 (1) b, the SIC can receive complaint/s under Section 18 against the concerned public authority, that is DM office, and take disciplinary action against them, Singh said in the order.
The SIC observed that recently District Collector of Indore Manish Singh had raised concerns about the RTI Act being misused and has become a means for blackmailing the public authorities, he said.
The SIC is of considerate view that by complying with Section 4 of the Act and disseminating most of the information widely and in such a form that is easily accessible to the public, would not only reduce blackmailing but will also ensure limited usage of RTI application by the public to obtain information, the order said.
The order came while hearing a complaint and appeal by Shivanand Dwivedi.
He had filed an RTI application with the office of Collector & District Magistrate, Rewa and subsequently a complaint for non-compliance of obligations under Section 4 (1) of the RTI Act by the DC office Rewa and by all other offices of Collector & District Magistrate in Madhya Pradesh.
Section 4 of the RTI Act states the obligations of public authorities to take necessary steps on their own to provide information to the public in an accessible form so that citizens have to minimally resort to filing an RTI application for most of the information.
This will save the public authority time and resources in cases where many RTI applications are filed, the order said.
It is observed that citizens filing RTI applications has become the norm than the exception which is not a sign of informed, transparent and accountable governance, it said.
A good governance is one which enables citizens to be informed so that they can participate in processes of governance to make it better for themselves and society at large however in the absence of transparency and accountability mechanism, governance becomes opaque, exclusionary and loses the public trust of citizens in the state, the order said.
The SIC expresses “grave concern” over the fact that even after 17 years since the enactment of the RTI Act, the DC offices in Madhya Pradesh show complete disregard to the law & transparency regime by not doing suo motu disclosures to provide public access to information in a clear and accessible format, it said. PTI AKV SMN
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