Applications pile up following SC RTI rider

On Monday, 73-three-year-old S B Repale was waiting outside the office of State Information Commissioner at the New Administrative Building hoping that his RTI appeals would be heard. But there was no such luck for him. "I have filed as many as 16 RTI appeals. I have been regularly coming here. But in last two weeks no hearing has been held," said Repale.

Like Repale, several citizens who have filed their second appeals with the State Information Commissioner's office have been making rounds of the SIC office for hearing of their pleas.

The RTI bench in Pune is not hearing the appeals after the Supreme Court order directing that State Information Commissions "henceforth" work on benches of two members each - one of them a 'judicial member' and the other an `expert member.

Raviraj Phalle, deputy secretary at SIC bench in Pune, said after the SC, the work at their bench has come to a standstill. "We got further state directive in the matter," he said. M H Shaha, State Information Commissioner, has been hearing as many as 12 appeals every day. "Since past fortnight, no hearing has been held following the Supreme Court order," Phalle said.

Till September 30, around 5,000 appeals have been pending with SIC bench Pune. Several appeals are pending since 2009. Before Shaha took over as the SIC, Vijay Kuvlekar who was the SIC who had set a record of hearings cases when two years ago he had cleared as many as 70 cases in a day.

RTI activist Vijay Kumbhar said the Pune SIC bench has been non-functional for months.

"Before the current SIC took over, there was no information commissioner for nearly eight months as the state had failed to appoint one after Kuvlekar retired."

Kumbhar said working of seven other benches too has come to a halt. "If Pune bench is grappling with 5,000 appeals, around 22,000 appeals are pending in other benches," he said.

... contd.

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