Ludhiana: The RTI activists here and certain city residents have blamed the municipal corporation for adopting a causal approach towards implementation of the Right to Information Act. They said apart from delaying the information, the officials were also careless in updating the information about the public information officers (PIOs) concerned on its website on regular basis.
The activists rued that they had complained about the carelessness of the civic body even to the Punjab State Information Commission, but they had failed to implement the required things.
The MC website says Anita Darshi is the first appellate authority in the civic body, whereas she has been transferred long back from the city. Similarly, many other officials have been mentioned as public information officers who have either retired or been shifted from here to other cities. Seeing this, the residents rued that the site was giving wrong information to them. The activists claimed that the civic body was paying money for regular maintenance of its official website but even then things were not getting updated. It is wastage of public money as well as leading to problems for the public, they added.
RTI activist Rohit Sabharwal said, “We are fed up of asking officials to provide right information to the public but they are hardly paying heed to our requests. It is clear violation of Section 4 of the RTI Act, which binds the public authority to take steps to provide as much information to the public at regular intervals through various means of communication, including internet.” He said they even approached the PSIC about the same and directions were also issued to the civic body in this regard, but then officials got transferred and again things returned to the same situation.
Another resident from civil city Harbhajan Singh said in case any person had to file an application or there was a need to approach the public information officer concerned, then how would a layman do the same because information on the MC website was not appropriate. He said it seemed that the authorities concerned were doing it knowingly so that people should face problems.
However, the zonal commissioner, Kulpreet Singh, said, “We have conveyed this to the website developer for doing the required changes but he has not done these so far. I will issue a show-cause notice to the person who is responsible for this failure.”