Following the guidelines and norms, the State Information Commission, Haryana has set a time limit for providing information and those officials who breach the norms, are subject to stern action. Amid this, it came to surface that the state government had imposed a penalty of Rs 2.76 crore on the information officials for not providing information within the stipulated time period.
As many as 1,726 officials failed to provide demanded information by the people and could not deposit the imposed penalty to the state exchequer. In view of this, the state government has issued new orders to deposit the above-mentioned penalty.
It is pertinent to mention that abiding by the Right to Information Act (RTI) 2005, officials are bound to provide information within 30 days and the breach of norms leads to imposing a penalty on the concerned officials. Delay in providing information results in per day bases penalty i.e., that amount Rs 250 and the maximum limit of penalty is 25000. It is learnt that there are so many officials who continue to violate the rules.
It is worth mentioning that a total of 3,589 officials have been found breaching the regulations fixed under aforesaid act since 2005 and in wake of this, the commission has imposed a penalty of Rs 4.79 crore. Out of this, an amount of Rs2.76 crore still stands unpaid by the officials which raises questions on their working style as well as their casual approach. Panchayati Raj department emerges in top in terms of penalty imposed on defaulter officials.
Regarding the issue, PP Kapoor, an RTI activist said that he had filed a complaint on July 21 this year in the Lokayukt court pertaining to charging of the penalty. Following the same, a high-level monitoring committee was formed under the chairmanship of the Chief Secretary to charge a penalty.
Besides, an order was passed to set up an online system to have an eye on the above. In continuation to aforesaid, it came to light that the monitoring committee has ordered to charge the penalty and abiding by the directions, every department will have to update the details about the defaulter officials.
It will be mandatory to forward the information to the head of the concerned department and with the secretary.
Apart from this, in order to charge the imposed penalty, the state government is most likely to send a circular to drawing and reimbursement officers.