The CBI, which is expected to keep a tab on cases under trial involving it, has claimed it has no records of such cases pending in various courts throughout the country.
India’s premier investigative agency says it has no clue
NEW DELHI: The CBI, which is expected to keep a tab on cases under trial involving it, has claimed it has no records of such cases pending in various courts throughout the country. Even the Central Information Commission (CIC) has expressed its inability to come to the rescue of one of CBI’s lawyers who feared that the non-maintenance of the list of its pending cases could compromise the agency’s ability to pursue prosecution.
Hearing a right to information application filed by Rajendra Singh, a public prosecutor with CBI, the apex information body said it was not competent under the law to decide on the matter. “The information held by the public authority (CBI) in this case has been provided and that is that they maintain no such list,” chief information commissioner Wajahat Habibullah said in a recent order.
Referring to the apprehensions raised by Singh, Habibullah said: “This may be the case but the point raised by the applicant is beyond the competence of this Commission to adjudicate upon.”
Singh, in his RTI application with the agency, had also sought inspection of files pertaining to him, as maintained by his employer’s (CBI) administration division, as well as the Directorate of Prosecution (DOP).
“...it is clarified that in the DOP, no list of cases under trial is maintained,” the central public information officer (CPIO) of the agency’s DOP had said in reply. The applicant who thereafter moved an application with CIC stated that the CBI’s stand on non-maintainability of trial case records was “unacceptable”. Singh also referred to a Kolkata high court order where it was held that in cases where a public prosecutor not appointed under law contested a case, the entire prosecution was void.
The CIC, however, found fault with the agency’s failure to forward the file to the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) after Singh’s plea where had also sought a copy of the finding of the disciplinary authority which had inquired into his written statement of defence. While the RTI Act provides five days for a public office to transfer an application to the proper authority, the CBI in this case took 11 months.
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