CBI demanded only partial exemption from RTI Act

The file notings provided by the Department of Personnel and Training, under RTI Act, show that in 2007, Committee of Secretaries had rejected the demand of the CBI to be included in the list of organisations exempted from the RTI Act except on allegations of human rights violations and corruption.

It had said CBI can utilise provisions of the RTI Act to reject an information. This year, CBI, which is probing several high profile cases like 2G scam, CWG scam and Adarsh Scam, pushed a fresh demand seeking "limited exemption" from the RTI Act in areas of intelligence collection, secret verification besides internal analysis of evidence and sources or process involved in its collection.

The request of the agency was termed as "vague" by the officials of the DoPT who demanded "full justifications" for such a demand.

The Central Vigilance Commissioner has also opined that only intelligence gathering arm of the CBI can be brought under the exemption clauses of the RTI Act.

The then Solicitor General of India Gopal Subramaniam had opined that the CBI can be considered to be added in the second schedule of the RTI Act, "with the qualification that after seeing out the words Central Bureau of Investigation certain words in parenthesis will be added i.e 'except matters pertaining to administration, personnel, accounts/finance, budget and training."

The Department, however, said according to the Act, once an organisation is placed in exemption clause of the RTI Act, no information except that related to allegations of human rights violation and corruption can be given, the notings provided to activist S C Agrawal show.

"There is no provision in the Act to specify any other category of information pertaining to that organisation which may or may not be disclosed," a department official said.

The DoPT finally came up with three options: exempting CBI from disclosing any information except allegations of human rights violation and corruption, exempting it except matters pertaining to administration and exempting only intelligence arm of the agency.

The CBI, however, strongly demanded that it should be "full exemption" from the RTI Act and keeping away only its special unit "may not serve purpose",

CBI's views received support from Attorney General Goolam Vahanvati who opined that given the work done by the agency, it is "legally feasible" to include the CBI in the second schedule of the RTI Act.

On exempting only investigative part of the CBI, as recommended by the Solicitor General, Vahanvati said keeping matters like administration within RTI Act would make "intelligence gathering difficult, if not impossible. Further such an exemption will have serious implications on other security agencies" already included in the clause.

He said limiting the exemption only to the intelligence unit of the CBI "would not serve the purpose because security of the state is interwind with investigation."

Following this, nod was given by the Committee of Secretaries and the Prime Minister to include the CBI in the list of organisations exempted from RTI Act.