New Delhi: The Haryana government appears to be deliberately soft-pedalling on the issue of recovery of penalties imposed on erring public information officers. Though in January this year, the state government had set up a monitoring committee headed by the chief secretary to recover these penalties, the latest data reveals that little progress has been made.
The imposition of penalties on information officers who deny rightful information to appellants is of great significance under the Right to Information (RTI) Act as it deters officers from not providing or withholding information. Section 20 of the RTI Act requires the Commission to initiate penalty proceedings in case of such violations.
The Delhi-based rights organisation, Satark Nagrik Sangathan (SNS), in a recent report on the performance of information commissions (ICs) had stated that the penalty imposed by them was extremely small as a fraction of the total cases in which it was imposable. The organisation said that out of many cases it had selected randomly and in which penalty was imposable, it was done so only in 4.9% of the cases.
Haryana SIC among best in imposing penalties
Incidentally, the Haryana SIC has one of the best track records in imposing such penalties – which may go up to Rs 25,000 – on erring officers. An assessment by SNS in 2020 of show-cause notices issued under the penalty clause by various SICs between April 1, 2019, and July 31, 2020 had revealed that, of the 13 commissions which provided information, Haryana ranked second with 3,962 penalty notices on the list.
So in the case of Haryana, the problem lies not with the Commission but the government. It is for this reason that several RTI activists in the state have complained to the Lokayukta in the past about the non-imposition of penalties by the Khattar government.
The monitoring committee under the chief secretary formed by the BJP-JJP government in January to resolve the issue has notmade any impact. This was revealed in information provided by the state government to Samalkha-based RTI activist P.P. Kapoor, showing that the actual realisation of penalties from errant PIOs has not happened.
No change in two years
In response to his RTI query, the state government told Kapoor that penalties worth Rs 2.76 crore were still pending from 1,726 PIOs. These penalties, it said, were realisable from all the 40 different departments.
In response to another query by him, the government revealed that they are now taking more steps towards the imposition of penalties. He was informed by the undersecretary in the Administrative Reforms Department of the Haryana government that in a meeting of the monitoring committee last month, directions that data on penalty recovery of each department be updated and the list of erring officers be provided to the concerned secretary or HoD.
However, this is hardly reassuring, considering that in most of these cases, the penalties have been pending for over two years now and the senior officials would in the ordinary course be aware of such data.
A similar RTI query on the imposition of penalties by Kapoor in 2019 had revealed a figure very close to the existing one. At that point in time, there were also 1,726 defaulters from whom penalties worth Rs 2.27 crore were recoverable.
Until December 2019, Kapoor was told, penalties worth Rs 3.50 crore were imposed but only 35% – around Rs 1.23 crore – had been recovered since 2006.
In fact, the data had revealed that the collection of penalties was much better under the previous Congress regime led by Bhupinder Singh Hooda. From 2006-2014, the recovery of penalties was 56.06%. Thereafter under the Khattar government, it dropped drastically to a mere 29.01%.