Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha secretariats, Delhi High Court not filing RTI compliance reports: Study

NEW DELHI: Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha secretariats and Delhi High Court are among some prominent offices which have not filed mandatory annual reports of compliance of RTI Act even once since the transparency law was enacted nine years ago, according to an advocacy group.

Commonwealth Human Right Initiative did a study of annual reports of the Central Information Commission which has been tabled in the Parliament every year and concluded that CIC is not able to compel a large number of public authorities to submit data.

Every public authority under the RTI Act is mandated to submit the statistics related to processing of the information seeking applications every year to the CIC.

"More than a quarter of the public authorities have not reported their RTI stats to the CIC. The reporting compliance rose in 2012-13 but fell again in 2013-14. The highest rate was in 2005-06 followed by 2007-08 when the reporting was more than 85 per cent," the analysis by Venkatesh Nayak shows.

He claimed there is a drop in the per centage of public authorities reporting to the CIC on RTI statistics.

"Parliament secretariats of the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha have never given RTI statistics to the CIC even once in the last nine years. This is something which the CIC is not even mentioning in its report.

"Yet, Parliament has the right to get annual reports on the implementation of the RTI Act every year. This is a contradiction of sorts that the supervisory body itself has never submitted RTI statistics to the CIC," he alleged.

Nayak claimed that Delhi High Court also has never submitted RTI statistics to the CIC till date although the Supreme Court has done so every year.