'Make state pollution control boards info public'

Central Information Commission directs Environment Ministry to comply before February 15

The Central Information Commission has directed the Environment Ministry to issue an order to all state pollution control boards to ensure that the proceedings conducted by them were put on the website within seven days of hearing a matter.

Information Commissioner Shailesh Gandhi said, “The public information officer is directed to ensure that an order to all State Pollution Control Boards to ensure that the proceedings are displayed regularly on their website before February 15, 2012”.

The transparency commission was hearing a complaint filed by Delhi resident Shibani Ghosh contending that the ministry’s website did not contain certain categories of information which should mandatorily be made available suo motu.

She submitted that the website of the Environment and Forest Ministry should include information like project proponent, six-monthly compliance reports etc.

The Environment and Forests Ministry has six regional offices in different parts of the country which performed a significant part of the functions, particularly those relating to site inspection and monitoring. However, not much information relating to the functioning of these regional offices were available on the ministry’s website, Ghosh said.

During the hearing, the complainant suggested that there should be a system to track the movement of an RTI application in the ministry.

Allowing the complaint, the Commission said the details regarding six-monthly compliance reports, reports of committees, certain additional studies should be made available and the information on different projects be uploaded on the website from April 1.

Mandatory obligation

The panel reminded the ministry officials that Section 4 (1) (a) of the Right to Information Act, 2005, is a mandatory obligation, which directed the government to “maintain all its records duly catalogued and indexed in a manner and the form which facilitates the right to information under this Act and ensure that all records that are appropriate to be computerised are, within a reasonable time and subject to availability of resources, computerized and connected through a network atll over the country on different systems so that access to such records is facilitated”.
“The Right to Information is a fundamental right of the citizens which has been codified by the RTI act of 2005. The act envisions that all citizens shall receive information primarily by suo motu disclosures by various public authorities as prescribed by section (4) of the act. Disclosures in accordance with the said section are crucial to ensure transparency and accountability in institutions.”

“This would reduce the load of RTI Applications being filed with each institution as information would be freely available to citizens and they would not have to apply for it. It further envisages that citizens would be required to specifically ask for information under section (6) only in a few cases.

Citizens have been demanding that certain information is essential to them and should be available proactively in form of public notice boards, display boards etc,” the commission said.