The government has agreed to make public the audio recordings of the proceedings of the Joint Drafting Committee constituted to frame the Lokpal Bill.
The Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) had earlier refused to put the committee's deliberations in the public domain, though the civil society members had demanded so.
The committee, comprising five members of Team Anna and an equal number of Cabinet Ministers, was formed on April 10 to finalise the draft of the Lokpal Bill. It included Union Ministers Pranab Mukherjee, P. Chidambaram, Veerappa Moily, Kapil Sibal and Salman Khursheed.
The civil society members are Anna Hazare, Justice (retired) N. Santosh Hegde, Shanti Bhushan, Prashant Bhushan and Arvind Kejriwal.
Responding to a query filed by activist S.C. Agrawal under the Right to Information Act, the DoPT has said the audio proceedings of the meetings of the committee have now become available. “There are nine CDs and you may deposit the copying fee of Rs. 450 so that copies of the CDs can be supplied to you,” Amarjit Singh, Under Secretary of the DoPT, has said.
Welcoming the decision, Mr. Agrawal said he would deposit the money under protest on Monday because the information under an RTI query had to be provided free of cost if the response did not come within 30 days.
Mr. Agrawal filed the RTI application in June.
Earlier, responding to an RTI query, the DoPT said it required the Law Ministry nod to make public the audio recordings of the closed-door meetings between the government and Team Anna.
“The Joint Drafting Committee was constituted by a notification of the Ministry of Law and Justice, wherein the JDC was supposed to evolve its own procedure. It may be further noted that the matter relating to RTI queries on audio-recordings of the JDC has been referred to the Department of Legal Affairs in the Ministry of Law and Justice for clarification,” an RTI response from the DoPT said.
