[rti4empowerment] ICs ARE LINIENT IN IMPOSING PENALTIES

'Hon'ble' Information Commissioners have been appointed to ensure the compliance of the RTI Act by public authorities and if some ICs dither in the same, they owe to explain the reasons to the citizens and justify their continuance.   RTI Act has given them free hand in the sense that they enjoy job security and govt. cannot remove them for not agreeing with their decisions.  They can only be removed by the President and Governors only by adopting a specific procedure.   Some activists have been alleging that due to extraneous considerations, some ICs refrain from leveling penalty and recommending penal action against the CPIOs.    The PCRF is in the process of publishing its report and till now, it has data in raw form.  I am asking to send this data by email and on its receipt, may share with the members, if desired.   Lenient RTI staffers caused 86cr loss to exchequer: Study   TIMES NEWS NETWORK   New Delhi: Information Commissioners across the country have caused a loss of Rs 86 crore during 2009-10 by not imposing penalties in cases where they ought to have done so as per provisions of the Right to Information (RTI) Act, according to a study by Public Cause Research Foundation.    The total expenditure on information commissions in the country (barring Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh) was just Rs 45.4 crore. This is significantly less than the revenue loss caused by not imposing penalties. "If all penalties were imposed, the running of the information commissions would not be a burden to the exchequer. In fact, it could become a revenue earner for the country," pointed out Arvind Kejriwal.    The study analysed over 76,800 orders passed by 87 commissioners and joint benches of 27 states. The orders of the Uttar Pradesh information commission and four commissioners of Jharkhand could not be analysed as they refused to give copies of their orders, which by law are supposed be up on their website for public consumption. As in the previous year, 2008-09, the North East has shown the best performance on implementation of the RTI Act by the information commissions.    "The computed loss of Rs 86 crore is a very conservative one as only the loss on account of not imposing penalty in cases of delay in providing information has been calculated. There are seven more provisions to impose penalty other than just delay in providing information. The loss would have been much higher if all the grounds were taken into account," explained Kejriwal.    Out of nearly 60,000 cases of delay in providing information, penalties were imposed in only 3.2% of cases, a marginal improvement from 2.4% the previous year. Out of 87 commissioners whose orders were analysed, 26 did not impose a single penalty in the whole year. Just six commissioners imposed penalty in more than 10% of the cases. R K Angousana Singh from Manipur is at the top having imposed penalties in almost 33% of cases.    The poor rate of disposal of cases shows why the RTI system is getting clogged with huge pendency. Twenty information commissioners had a pendency of over a year. At the current rate of case disposal, Jagdananda of Orissa, with the worst record — just 304 cases disposed in a year — would take 10.7 years to clear just the pending cases, not including fresh ones which would come up in the 10 years.    Similarly, Sujit Kumar Sarkar of West Bengal who disposed just 42 cases in a year would take 10.2 years to clear the pending cases.    "When you delay disposing cases and do not impose penalties, the message to the bureaucracy is that there is no consequence to not giving information. This leads to even more appeals being filed and greater pendency of cases," said Kejriwal.