Over 7,000 appeal cases pending at Haryana State Information Commission, ₹2.84 crore unrecovered penalties: Reply to RTI

Over 7,000 appeal cases pending at Haryana State Information Commission, with ₹2.84 crore in unrecovered penalties.

More than 7,000 appeal cases are pending before the Haryana State Information Commission, revealed a reply to an application under the Right To Information Act. Besides, ₹2.84 crore — which is almost half the penalty imposed on State Public Information officials (SPIOs) for delay in imparting the information since the Commission was set up in 2005 — is yet to be recovered.

As per the reply to the RTI application filed by Panipat-based P.P. Kapoor, 8,340 appeal cases were pending before the Chief Information Commissioner and seven State Information Commissioners together in January last year, and the number came down to 7,216 till December. “The reply shows that only 1,000-odd cases have been decided by the SIC in a year’s time. Going at this pace, the commission might take 7-8 years to clear the backlog,” said Mr. Kapoor, alleging that present regime wanted to “kill” the law which was a “weapon” in the hands of the masses to ensure accountability and transparency.

Questioning the government’s intent to strengthen the law, Mr. Kapoor said as per the reply, around ₹128 crore was spent on the salaries, wages and other expenses, but a meagre ₹2.49 lakh has been spent to create awareness on the law over the past two decades. “In reply to a question on the amount spent to popularise the law, the SIC said that only five workshops were conducted since 2005 in which 896 people participated. The last such workshop was held at Panchkula in 2011,” said Mr. Kapoor.

The Commission, over the past two decades, has imposed ₹5.86 crore penalty on the officials in 3,611 cases for not imparting the information within the stipulated time of one month but managed to recover only ₹2.84 crore so far. The Commission has awarded ₹92 lakh compensation in 1,974 cases.

To the questions seeking details of SPIOs and First Appellant Authority officials appointed across the State and the number of those officials imparted training under the Act, the Commission said that compiled data was not available with it.

“If the Commission does not have the details of the SPIOs and the First Appellant Authority officials then who will have this information?,” asked Mr. Kapoor, demanding that the government must seriously implement the law, recover the outstanding penalty dues and make public the details of the officials concerned.

An email to Chief Information Commissioner IAS (retd.) Vijai Vardhan to seek his response went unanswered.