The Central Information Commission has pulled up a former Congress MP for a 10-year delay in paying his official telephone dues, running to nearly Rs 4 lakh.

Anand Ahirwar, who was MP from Sagar constituency in Madhya Pradesh between 1991 and 1996, had refused to pay his BSNL bills of Rs 3,96,984 on the main pretext that his call records were not “genuine”.

Despite a Bombay High Court order in August 1999, directing the telephone department to recover his dues by appointing an Arbitrator, the MP, in an effort to further delay the payment, approached the CIC, seeking complete access to his telephone records.

Noting that the former MP was seeking information just to bide time, Information Commissioner M M Ansari “advised” Ahirwar that he “should have paid the bills at least to the extent he believes the bills are genuine”. The Commission criticised the politician for not making “partial or full payment of user charges for the last 10 years or so, causing revenue loss to the BSNL.”

“Beneficiaries of the services provided by BSNL should not be encouraged to delay payment of dues on one pretext or the other,” the Commission noted. “In the garb of seeking information, there is no justification for delaying payment of the entire user charges as made out by BSNL,” it said.

According to the MP, he was not satisfied with the “incomplete and misleading information” or lack of genuineness of the records (supplied to him by the BSNL under the RTI). Hence, he had pleaded before the Commission for “access to complete records, especially telephone bills on the basis of which the total payable dues have been calculated”.

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