The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) dissolved its Right To Information (RTI) Cell in 2017 aiming to make the process of filing RTIs faster by decentralising it and guiding citizens to Public Information Officers (PIO). A PIO is responsible for processing RTI requests received by them and providing the information to those who have sought it. But five years later, it is becoming clear that this new process has increased the time taken to process RTIs and has led activists to chasing the responses to their RTIs for months.
Rajani Rao, an environmental researcher, had filed three RTIs dated as far back as September 2021 and two are yet to receive a response. The road to receiving the one response that they did, was not easy either. It became possible only after multiple appeals and visits to the BBMP and the Solid Waste Management (SWM) Department. The RTIs sought information regarding implementation of solid waste management rules and fees collection by BBMP ward marshals.
It took Divya Narayanan, a Campaigns Director at Jhatkaa.org, five hours to file one offline RTI with the SWM Department in BBMP. Jhatkaa is a campaigning organisation that aims at increasing citizen participation with the government. When the RTI was finally filed, the concerned department allegedly did not have the documentation to answer their RTI. “It was only after we filed the RTI that the department started building the documentation,” said Divya.
Sreeja Chakraborty, an environmental lawyer, has also been actively filing RTIs seeking information from the SWM department. Sreeja alleges that they did not even receive any communication or acknowledgement on their RTIs. “We had filed online RTIs but did not receive any information from those as well. It was after this we resorted to filing offline RTIs. But the system of filing an offline RTI is such a maze that a regular person would be defeated and not file an RTI at the end of the day,” she said. Divya and Sreeja were made to go back and forth between multiple departments at the SWM without any clear instructions on whom they could approach to file their RTI.
When the centralised RTI cell functioned, citizens could simply address their RTIs to ‘PIO, BBMP.’ It would then be the responsibility of the cell to forward the request to the relevant PIO. With the cell dissolved, citizens have to locate the PIOs by themselves if they are to file an offline RTI. If one is able to locate the correct PIO for the respectives departments, the filing gets much easier. However, it is locating these PIOs and the relevant departments which is the hard task. Bengaluru alone has over 500 PIOs. The BBMP website does have a list of PIOs and their contact details, but this list is only available in Kannada with most of the contacts being outdated.
However, the filing of an online RTI is fairly simple if one is aware of which department and zone deals with the information that they are seeking. After that, an RTI request can be submitted through the online Karnataka RTI portal. The form asks a few simple questions about the applicant such as address and contact details along with if the applicant is a Below Poverty Line (BPL) beneficiary. The Rs 10 charge for filing an RTI is waived off for BPL beneficiaries, for which they also have to provide their BPL card number.
After an RTI has been filed, the applicant may seek for an appeal if it is not answered within 30 days of the application's submission date. If the applicant is unsatisfied with the RTI response, they may also file an appeal. Within 90 days of the day the decision was made or ought to have been made in the first appeal, a second appeal may be submitted to the Central Information Commission or the State Information Commission. Another issue that the RTI activists face here is identifying the right appellate officer to whom the first appeal must be filed as this list also is outdated.
The only demand that the RTI activists have is to make filing RTIs more accessible. They demand that the RTI cell be made functional again and the BBMP website be regularly updated with the latest information on PIOs and appellate authorities in both English and Kannada.
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