Our Response to Uttarakhand Commission
Dear Sir,
We are extremely grateful to your response.
We completely agree with you that there is an overlap in the law. Section 19(1) of RTI Act and section 18(1)(c) and 18(1)(e) talk of exactly similar situations i.e. if a person does not receive any response or receives an unsatisfactory response within prescribed time period, he can either approach the Commission directly under section 18 or he can file first appeal under section 19.
Interestingly, we have observed a range of practices across the country. On one extreme are Commissioners like Mr Naveen Kumar of Maharashtra who remanded back as much as 50% of his cases whereas his own colleague Mr Vijay Kuvlekar did not remand back any case. Mr C D Arha of Andhra Pradesh remanded back 34% of the cases received by him. However, within the same Commission, Mr Dileep Reddy and Mr K S Rao did not remand back even a single case. In Haryana, on one hand, Mrs Meenaxi Anand remanded back 47% cases, her colleagues Mr M R Ranga and Mrs Asha Sharma did not remand back even a single case. The entire Commissions of Assam, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand, including all its Commissioners, did not remand back even a single case. Karnataka, Punjab and Kerala remanded back negligible number of cases. At Central Information Commission, Mr S N Mishra remanded back as many as 26% cases followed by Mr Wajahat Habibullah and Mr A N Tiwari who remanded back 18% cases.
Commissioners have forwarded interesting arguments depending upon the practice that they follow. One argument is that the law gives an option to the appellant – whether the appellant wishes to invoke section 18 or section 19. Section 19 says that the appellant “may” file first appeal. Section 18 says that it “shall be the duty” of the Information Commission “to receive and enquire into a complaint” received. Section 18 casts very strong duty upon the Commissions to act upon complaints received under section 18. Therefore, it is argued, that the Commission should respect the decision of the appellants, which section they wish to invoke, as this option has been given to the appellants by the Parliament. The other extreme argument is that any complaint filed under section 18 should be returned back if there were no first appeal filed. That argument, however would render section 18 completely ineffective. A middle path has been chosen by some commissioners. If an appellant does not receive any response from the PIO within 30 days, they entertain a complaint under section 18. But if an appellant is dissatisfied with the response received, they treat it an issue of adjudication or appeal and require first appeal to be filed in such cases.
There is a huge confusion in the minds of the people. What is the right practice? Within the same Commission, the Commissioners are following completely different practices.
We are very happy that you have initiated this debate. That was the purpose of this entire exercise. That was also one of the objectives of instituting these awards – to initiate public debate on certain issues affecting RTI implementation regime, through concrete data.
We are also very happy that you are releasing your response to the media. If you permit us, may we also put your response and our response on our website and initiate a debate on the same? We assure you that the debate would be moderated to ensure that frivolous response is adequately edited.
You have mentioned that you are sending us copies of External Review Report and Action Plan for improving First appeals. We are really grateful to you for that. We will explore the possibility of including assessment of First Appellate mechanism also in our study next year.
So that the “Pro-Disclosure” word does not cause any confusion in the minds of the people, we will be putting up complete break up of each Commissioner on our website by Monday or Tuesday. Though we have all the data, due to some last moment technical snag, the data could not be displayed on the site.
We look forward to your active participation in this exercise. The final Awards ceremony would take place on 1st December. Hon’ble Vice President of India has kindly agreed to be the Chief Guest. Please treat this as an advance intimation and invitation and kindly block your dates. We would separately be sending you a formal invitation.
With warm regards
Arvind Kejriwal
