[IAC#RG] URGENT: Maintaining records of the Hon'ble Committee for retrieval under Right to Information Act.

BY EMAIL

To:
The Justice J.S Verma Committee

Date: 08.Jan.2011

Kind Attn: Hon'ble Chief Justice of India (Retd) J.S. Verma and his co-committee members.

Respected Sirs/Madam,

I am given to understand from my telephone enquiries at your office that about 21,000 responses have been received by your Hon'ble Committee in response to the public notice issued on or about 25.12.2012, and that the overwhelming majority of these are delivered by email.

Unfortunately, the members of the public have not been receiving acknowledgments of their email submissions to the Committee, causing them to apprehend that their submissions may be denied subsequently. It may be mentioned that setting up an "auto-acknowledgment" facility is a trivial job in any email system and "NIC" routinely does this for submissions to say the PMO or Rashtrapati Bhawan etc.(copies of which can be supplied on demand).

Your Office was also unable to provide me a diary/receipt number for our submissions, hence this email.

I would urge the Hon'ble Committee to ensure that all emails received are retained on on NIC's servers and not deleted therefrom. It is pertinent that the NIC is a Certifying Authority under the Information Technology Act.The public at large, and certainly the India Against Corruption movement, is deeply interested in reading all responses received and shall be filing Right to Information requests to the Ministry of Home Affairs to be provided all the electronic (and other) responses received on Compact diskettes, and are concerned that genuine and authentic information be provided to them from the original instead of unauthentic downloads to Microsoft Outlook etc. or printouts therefrom.

I would also urge this Hon'ble Committee to interface with the NIC to ensure that all electronic responses received in response to the public notice are uploaded immediately to the Website of the Committee in the interests of full transparency and disclosure.

I would be obliged if receipt of this email is acknowledged by return email today or latest by tomorrow, as I am given to understand that this Hon'ble Committee is an administrative Committee under the Ministry of Home Affairs to whom the Manual of Office Procedure's provisions apply.

With best wishes
yours faithfully

Er. Sarbajit Roy
National Convenor
India Against Corruption jan andolan

B-59 Defence Colony
New Delhi 110024
Tel : 09311448069