While activists have been crying foul over an amendment to Maharashtra Right to Information Act rules effected by the erstwhile Congress-NCP government in 2012 restricting a petitioner’s plea to 150 words, a State Information Commissioner (SIC) has contended that the move has proved counterproductive for the government.
D.B. Deshpande, SIC, has observed that Maharashtra’s amendment to the RTI Act brought about by the erstwhile Prithviraj Chavan government two years earlier had defeated its purpose of streamlining the flow of information seekers by instead making the process of filing pleas more onerous.
The amendment made in January 2012 limited the request for information to 150 words with the further caveat that the request must pertain to one subject matter only and that separate applications must be made in the event of the request pertaining to more than one subject.
“I fear the process to streamline information seekers has backfired with one applicant filing no less than 39 second appeals merely to know how stamp duty was collected and calculated,” observed Mr. Deshpande, stating that the applicant had resorted to filing multiple appeals, as his RTI application had been repeatedly turned down by the public information officer (PIO) on the ground that the information sought was outside the purview of the Act.
The former State government had introduced the change with a view to drastically reduce the time taken to answer long RTI applications. But according to activists, almost 30 per cent of the information requests since 2012 have been rejected by information authorities who cite the amendment.
“The limiting of the petitioner’s brief to 150 words not only paradoxically increases the paperwork but can also be used as a convenient pretext by PIOs to deny information. Hence, we had filed a PIL challenging the amendment in 2012 as well as a fresh one recently in the Bombay High Court,” said Pune-based RTI activist Vijay Kumbhar.
