India Right To Information

Three years after the Right To Information (RTI) Act came into effect, the right' of the applicant to seek free' information has become a point of contention, with public information officers in many departments asking for salaries, allowances and maintenance costs to prepare replies to RTI queries.Having delivered contradictory orders on the issue, the Central Information Commission has decided to conduct a full bench hearing on the matter on June 8.

The CIC wrote to 19 government departments and public sector undertakings last week inviting them to submit their views on section 7 (3) of the Act which deals with collection of further fee' from the RTI applicant. "In the case of K K Kishore vs Institute of Company Secretaries, an important question has arisen as regards the ambit and scope of Section 7(3) of the RTI Act which deals with charging of further fee to be determined by central public information officers. The commission decided that the case be heard by a larger bench since the issue is important from the legal point of view,'' the CIC said in its notice to government departments and PSUs.

Secretaries of union ministries of personnel, law and justice, public enterprises and company affairs and chairpersons of 14 public sector undertakings including BSNL, IOC, FCI, MTNL, BHEL, BPCL and GAIL were asked to submit their written submissions and also send a senior officer each to the hearing.

However, many RTI activists oppose the CIC's move to interpret the provision as they think it could dilute the scope of the law. "We don't understand why only a handful of ministries and PSUs have been invited to submit their views and why the CIC did not call for opinions from the general public in the matter,'' said Venkatesh Nayak of Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, a Delhi-based NGO, who made a written submission to the commission opposing the PIOs' demand for special wages.

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