Information commissioner of the Konkan region M.B. Shaha, has showed up to work for only 71 days out of the 22 months.
Since the post of the information commissioner in the Konkan region had been lying vacant since the last three years, Mr Shaha, who is the information commissioner for Pune, was given an additional charge of handling the Konkan region. Ever since his induction, the cases of pending appeals and complaints have increased drastically.
A performance figure of the RTI office, obtained from an RTI query itself, has revealed the same. An RTI figure shows that since 2010, the commission received 11,113 second appeals, out of which only 4,724, that constitute merely 42 per cent of the total appeals, have been disposed off so far. This commission disposed 418 cases out of 3,060 cases of the second appeals in 2001, while its performance improved in the next year when the commission disposed 2,987 out of 3,294 cases filed as second appeals.
The commission received a total of 1,376 complaints between January, 2010 and May, 2013, out of which only 563 (41 per cent) were disposed off. Almost 500 complainants have been waiting for a response since June, 2011. “This is the scene despite the fact that more than two dozen Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officers are idling, waiting for appropriate assignment at the cost of taxpayers’ money,” said Ravi Srivastava, chief convener of the Aam Admi Party in the Thane district and RTI activist, who procured this RTI query. He has dashed off this figure to the chief minister, and has demanded to keep a full-time information commissioner who could clear the backlog of appeals and complaints within a stipulated period
He said, “There are specific time frames within which a reply has to be made to RTI queries. But, the disposal of the first and second appeal has no such bindings on the Information commissioners. So, I have demanded that the CM should fix such bindings.”
However, commenting on Mr Shaha’s performance, another noted RTI activist Vijay Kumbhar said, “Mr Shaha’s disposal rate and quality of decision has been very pathetic. The Konkan division needs another information commissioner immediately.”
Despite repeated attempts, Mr Shaha was unavailable for comment.