Even after nine years of enactment of the Right to Information (RTI) Act, many officials including the lokayukta of MP have not declared their assets to the public, a right activist here claimed on Saturday.
City’s right activist Ajay Dubey said that the RTI was the biggest ever tool being provided to the people of the country since Independence to finish corruption. However, unfortunately those sitting on higher echelons with responsibility to abolish corruption suppressed this very law depriving the basic rights of the common people.
In a statement, Dubey said that when the powerful Act had entered into its first decade of implementation in the State, the MP Information Commissioners have not made public their moveable and immoveable properties despite the fact that the Central Information Commissioners have done so.
The MP lokayukta has also not made his property details public, that should also be done at the earliest, he added. He said that the Chief Minister, his Cabinet colleagues, lokayukta and higher officials of the State, despite repeated instructions of Government of India in 2011 and 2012, are not making any detail of their national and international tours public on their websites under RTI.
He said the former and current Chief Information Commissioners recommended teaching RTI to school children and to make provisions for applying RTI through e-mail and call centres in the Government departments but the State Government did not implemented it.
The State Government was not revealing 99.9 per cent information under Section of the Act that is a compulsion. The Government was also not making information pertaining to public interest Government decisions public under Section 4 of the RTI act, he added.
Dubey also demanded from the State Government to strengthen RTI and review its implementation in Government offices and take action against guilty and for the successful implementation of the RTI Act in the State the Madhya Pradesh State Information Commission (MPSIC) should post Information Commissioners at all the divisional headquarters so that the peoples need not come to Bhopal.