The state information commissioner for Gujarat, RN Das, retired on Wednesday. Though he is credited with implementing of the Right to Information Act a huge success in Gujarat,the institution he headed did not file a single annual report to the state assembly in the past five years, as mandated by the Act.
The state information commissioner for Gujarat, RN Das, retired on Wednesday. Though he is credited with making implementation of the Right to Information Act a huge success in Gujarat, the institution he headed did not file a single annual report to the state assembly in the past five years, as mandated by the Act.
The Centre might have constituted a special task force to review the mechanism of maintaining and publishing records of information given to public under the RTI Act, but the public authorities across Gujarat have done little precious in this regard.
The State Information Commission says that it has not been able to file a single annual report before the assembly as statistics provided by the authorities are inaccurate and unreliable.
Talking to DNA, RN Das, the state information commissioner, whose tenure for five years ended on Wednesday, confirmed the issue of non-submission of reports and attributed the delay to the unreliable nature of information provided by public authorities to the commission.
"The information provided by the public authorities was so unreliable that the officers of the commission took a long time in its verification and sorting. This delayed the process of compiling the reports.
However, now they are in the final stage and will be filed soon," Das said. The commission, under the RTI Act, has to submit to the state assembly an annual report narrating the implementation of the Act with necessary recommendations and action plans.
However, it has been over five years since the RTI Act came into force and the state information commission (SIC) has not submitted a single report.
The commission and the General Administration Department (GAD), the nodal agency for collecting information from public authorities and supplying it to the commission, are blaming public authorities for the delay.
They say that the public authorities do not have a proper mechanism in place to maintain a record of information and statistics they provided to the public.
"The information provided by the public authorities was so unreliable that the officers of the commission took a long time in its verification and sorting. This delayed the process of compiling the reports.
However, now they are in the final stage and will be filed soon," Das said. Sources in the commission told DNA that the data and statistics received by the commission from authorities were not reliable and far away from reality.
The commission had to do the exercise of collecting the data from the original source and thus had to take up the job of the public authorities and GAD, the sources further said.
However, GAD officials said that they have no powers to compel the authorities to submit the information and records. A senior official, on the condition of anonymity, told DNA that the department had issued several notices to all the public authorities of the state and sought the data. Some have provided them while many have failed to compile and maintain the records. The official further said that there is no way they can force the authorities to submit the statistics. He further said the commission also did not inform the GAD about the authorities that had failed to submit the information.
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