The decision of the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) to close down the Right to Information cell at its headquarters has not gone down well with RTI activists. The Bangalore Development Authority, too, had shut its RTI cells a couple of months ago.
Calling it an attempt to avoid giving information to the public, Veeresh Bellur, an RTI activist said, “The cell was opened to ease the process of submitting RTI queries. Officials in the cell would themselves direct the application to the department concerned. Now, applicants will have to do all this. If one has to file an RTI application in Mahadevapura, there is no way of knowing where the Public Information Officer’s (PIO) office is located to send the application. Nether have the PIOs’ telephone numbers or email ids been listed on the BBMP website,” Mr. Bellur said.
“When we visit the office, the PIO is always out and there is no one to receive the RTI application. The RTI Cell was very useful,” he said.
A majority of RTI applications that the BBMP received dealt either with work order of a certain development project or sanction of building plans. “Both these are public documents and should be available on the website, but they are not. So many of us are forced to take the RTI route. Now, with the closure of the cell, we will get no answers,” he said. Members of the Karnataka RTI Activists Forum have written to the Additional Chief Secretary and met the Chief Information Officer. “Instead of streamlining the working of the cell, the BBMP has arbitrarily shut it down. This is a tactic for curtailing the use of RTI,” said Ravindranath Guru, member of the forum.
There are 502 PIOs in the city, and for a city-wide issue such as rainwater harvesting, we would have to apply to all the 198 wards, which is humanly not possible, he said, adding that the forum wants the cell to be reopened. “There is no transparency in the administration. We want the cell to be reopened and strengthened,” Mr. Guru said.
Meanwhile, BBMP Commissioner Manjunath Prasad said the decision was taken following a directive of the Information Commission.
“All RTI applications related to respective wards were landing at the cell and it was taking a long time to transfer the applications to respective PIO officers. The Information Commission took exception to this and asked the headquarters to take applications only pertaining to it,” he said.
Asked about the difficulty in finding PIO information on the BBMP website, he said, “We have a list of PIOs and we will make it easily accessible to the public by Monday.”
