NEW RTI APPEAL RULES NOTIFIED
Aloke
Tikku, Hindustan Times
New
Delhi, August 08, 2012
The
government has notified a new set of rules for moving the Central Information
Commission (CIC) against government departments, laying down the basic
standards that the appeal will have to meet to be taken up. The new rules were
notified by the Department of Personnel and Training
(DoPT) at the request of the CIC that was
grappling with incoherent and incomplete appeals.Chief Information Commissioner
Satyananda Mishra said the commission had not insisted on a format or content
of an appeal in the initial phase since the implementation of the law was still
in its infancy.
“But
now that the number of RTI appeals has gone up, it has become extremely
difficult for us to cope with incomplete, and sometimes illegible appeals,”
Mishra told Hindustan Times.
In the
past, the CIC has accepted letters written to the commission as formal appeals
and got around to putting together the necessary paperwork at its own
initiative.
With
nearly a million RTI applications filed annually, the proportion of appeals has
also increased considerably. As the CIC, Mishra has about 1,233 pending appeals
to deal with.
As a
result of the backlog, a denial of information appeal would have to wait for
about 8 to 12 months before the information commissioner can take up the case.
The new
rules – notified on 31 July but yet not put in public domain by DoPT – not only
lists the documents that would need to accompany an appeal but also lays down a
format for the applications.
Deviation
from the format would not be a ground for rejecting an appeal to ensure that
the poor were not discriminated against.
But for the rest, “I think it is only fair
to expect people to cooperate with us”.
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