Alleging that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has refused to implement the Right to Information (RTI) Act in its organisation, city’s rights activist Ajay Dubey said that Madhya Pradesh Government has distanced itself from implementing the Act in the Government funded non-governmental organisations in the city. In a statement here on Thursday, Dubey, also the director of Transparency International, said that he had two hearings before the Chief Information Commissioner (CIC) here on Thursday. Of them, the first one was against the non implementation of RTI in the BJP, in that the BJP in a written reply refused to implement RTI.
“Our argument in the case was that the BJP gets rebate in Income tax on the donations it receives and the State headquarters of BJP in Bhopal is built on the land that the party got at throw away price from the Government. Hence, as per the judgment of the Central Information Commission dated June 13, 2013, it is public authority and is bound to implement RTI in it,” he added. He said that in the second case the General Administration Department (GAD) of the State refused to take any action against the Government funded NGOs if they did not implement RTI.
“Our argument in this case was that the GAD department had a RTI cell and it is its responsibility to ensure that the RTI is implemented in all the organizations that are considered public authority and under section 25 of the RTI Act prepare a list of all such organizations and table it every year in the state assembly,” he said, adding that the Government of India (GoI) issued instructions on April 15, 2013 that list of all government funded NGOs should be prepared. At present the GAD does not have any list of such NGOs, though it could obtain it from the collectors and the head of the departments of various government departments, he added. The RTI activist said that at present not a single department’s website is showing the list of such NGOs that they are bound to show under section 4 of the RTI Act.