The Centre has issued guidelines providing for a third party audit to assess compliance of a provision of the RTI Act, which mandates a public authority to put governance related information in the public domain. The departments have been asked to comply with these guidelines within six months as per Sec 4 of the RTI Act to ensure maximum transparency.
“It was also requested that the action taken report on the compliance of guidelines should be sent, along with the Uniform Resource locator (URl) link, to Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) and the Central Information Commission (CIC) soon after the expiry of the initial period of the six months.
“It has been noticed that most of the ministries or departments or public authorities have not sent the compliance report or action taken report to this department and CIC,” the Personnel Ministry had said in a recently issued office memorandum.
In a Press release issued on Thursday the Personnel Ministry said it should be a constant endeavour of every public authority to take steps for providing information suo motu to the public at regular intervals through various means of communications so that the public has to minimally resort to the use of RTI Act.