Departments yet to index records, claims RTI activist

Mangalore, November 10: 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 during 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 last two years on this issue and that the case was now 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. They would also know what sort of information was available, he said. The deadline complete the indexing of records ended a long time 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.

He suggested that perhaps the delay was deliberate.

Under the same sections, all government departments were supposed to disclose certain information such as the names of Public Information Officers (PIOs), appellate authority, officers salaries, the assets of the departments, number of vehicles and the drivers, the number of vacant posts in the department, the bank account number of the department, and the funds granted by government and the expenditure of those funds.

Mr. Bhat also said that often officials claimed that records were lost, and although FIRs were registered after repeated directions from the courts, the police merely recorded that statements were recorded but the files could not be found. Recently, however, a law had been 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.

Corporation Bank general manager B.R. Bhat, J.K. Rao, IMM past president, among others, were present