No government department in the district has fully indexed its records, Right to Information activist Prakash Bhat said here on Wednesday.
He was delivering a talk on the Right to Information Act 2005 at a programme organised by Lions Club Cauvery, Mangalore, the District Coordinator of RTI, and Issues and Concerns magazine.
Mr. Bhat said that he had been fighting against officials in the Mangalore tahsildar's office for the past two years on this issue and the case was pending in court.
Indexing of records as specified under Section 4 (1) (a) and (b) would make it easier for applicants to ask for specific information. The applicants would also know what sort of information was available, he said.
The deadline for completing the indexing of records ended long ago, he said. After the records were indexed and a name and number assigned to each file, the records were also supposed to be updated every December.
Under the same sections, all government departments were supposed to disclose certain information such as names of Public Information Officers (PIOs), appellate authority, officers' salaries, assets of the departments, number of vehicles and drivers, number of vacant posts in the department, bank account number of the department, and funds granted by government and spending made. Mr. Bhat said often officials claimed that records were lost, and although FIRs were registered after repeated directions from the courts, the police merely recorded the statements but the files could not be found. Recently, a law was passed to penalise officials under whose tenure records had been lost.
Those with BPL cards could obtain information that was contained in paper sheets worth Rs. 100 for free, and thereafter, could inspect the information before they obtained copies, he said.
