Tamil Nadu

“RTI Act has brought about transparency in governance”

CHENNAI: The Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005, is turning out to be a boon for the naturally curious. From a question on the attendance records of employees in a particular government office to one on why BSNL, a government entity, cannot provide coverage everywhere in India, the State Chief Information Commissioner S. Ramakrishnan says he is seeing it all.

Enacted to ensure transparent governance, the RTI Act was intended to provide the common man access to government records in timely fashion. The Information Commission is the highest authority hearing RTI petitions in the State with Public Information Officers (PIO) and the Appellate Authority (AA) forming the first two levels in the hierarchy.

Although the Information Commission itself tries to receive only such petitions that cannot be settled at the lower levels, Mr. Ramakrishnan says the number of complaints he receives has shown up the insufficiency of the machinery in place.

“We receive about 400 complaints each day which is nearly four times what we did last year. With only a few stenographers and three commissioners, the volume has just been too much to handle,” he says.

Recently, four more commissioners were appointed to reduce the workload. But they are still in the process of training by the existing commissioners. They participate in enquiries conducted by the senior commissioners, and it is hoped that they will be ready to handle cases on their own in a short while.

The administrative troubles notwithstanding, the number of frivolous petitions the Commission receives does slow down the process. Mr. Ramakrishnan can even identify certain ‘star’ complainants who are regulars in his office. “They almost seem to be walking around the city to find something to type to me as a petition,” he says.

Although he would like to regard every complaint seriously and conduct enquiries, the sheer workload has meant that the commissioners dispose most of the complaints by mail itself and hold very few enquiries. “We have also found ways of responding quicker by categorising the different complaints into 35-40 kinds. Less than 5 per cent need to be heard directly by the Commission,” he says.

Some of the categories include the really frivolous like the one seeking information on the number of people spitting on the streets of Chennai, which warrant only a polite smile and shake of the head. At the other end of the spectrum are the genuine complaints like the one about a tahsildar refusing to release land records, which was resolved by a simple communication to the tahsildar.

The most common complaints, the Commissioner says, are personal grievances about which the Commission itself can rarely do anything. But the situation is improving as only 2 per cent of complaints in the current year are focused on individual grievances while the rest concern matters of information-seeking, he says.

While problems abound, the Commissioner also notes with satisfaction that a number of people have benefited from the offices.

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