Taking serious cognisance of blatant misuse of the provisions of the Right to Information (RTI) Act-2005, Punjab State Information Commission has admonished an RTI activist Naresh K Gupta for his act and conduct of filing verbatim identical RTI applications before the same Public Authorities established under the Act, besides further taking the said matter to First Appeal and Second Appeal, respectively.
The matter came to the fore when a bunch of 13 applications of Second Appeal, filed by Naresh K Gupta, was listed before the Bench of Punjab State Information Commissioner Maninder Singh Patti.
At the time of hearing, the Respondent-Public Information Officer (PIO) drew attention towards two such specific appeal cases, pending before the coordinate Bench of the Commission, where the appellant Gupta had filed identical RTI Application, which was verbatim similar to those filed in the appeal cases, which were being adjudicated before the Bench of Punjab State Information Commissioner Maninder Singh Patti, who upon calling for the records of the said pending cases and comparing them with the case before him, came to a conclusion that the stand of the Respondent PIO was correct.
Upon taking serious note of the fact, the state SIC Patti held that the said Act not only amounts to abuse of process of law but also lines up in stark violation of the statement of objects and reasons with the Right to Information Act was enacted.
It was further observed that such tactics, being adopted by the RTI Activists, need to be deprecated and it has to be ensured that the provisions of beneficial legislation like the RTI Act are not misused by individuals to harass the government officials.
Lastly, the Commission also noted that Appellant Naresh K Gupta had filed 12, out of 13 RTI Applications under the ‘life and liberty’ clause whereas in neither of his Application he had spelled out any reason which would show any element of imminent danger to life and liberty justifying the filing of said Applications under ‘life and liberty’ clause.
The Commission held that the act of filing the RTI Applications under the ‘life and liberty’ clause was not justified by any extent and was a mere tool to pressurize the officials.