CIC- appellant must show utmost responsibility while exercising his right under RTI
22 Jan, 2013Background
The appellant filed an application under the Right to Information (RTI) Act with the North Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC) seeking information from January 1994 to December 2011. He sought for the names of deceased people who were the employees of the Department along with their personal details. He also wanted the names of applicants who had applied for employment on compassionate grounds pursuant to the death of the deceased employees along with their personal information. The Public Information Officer (PIO) forwarded the RTI application to various holders of information in the different departments of the MCD. On appeal, the First Appellate Authority (FAA) ruled that the PIOs had already provided information to the appellant as was available with them. The appellant was requested to inspect the record and specify the records required by him so that the same could be provided to him however, the applicant did not agree to this suggestion. The FAA also noted that the information sought by the appellant is extremely voluminous and scattered over various zones of MCD and is not available in a compiled form. Thus compiling of this information would disproportionately divert resources of the public authority in terms of section 7 (9) of the Act, therefore, it was ruled that it was not possible to provide the requested information to the appellant.
View of CIC
The Commission accepted the contentions of the FAA and observed that the appellant has not established any larger public interest in the disclosure of information which is voluminous and requires to be compiled from large number of files across several departments of MCD. The CIC held that the information regarding the names of the deceased employees along with name of father, date of death and the payment of terminal benefits have already been provided to the appellant. Regarding the information pertaining to Swachchata Karamcharis appointed on compassionate grounds, the CIC held that same can be provided to the appellant if he seeks specific information directly from each of the departments all of which have appointed separate PIOs by preferring independent RTI applications. The Commission noted that by seeking information that covers 18 years the appellant has certainly put great pressure on the resources of the MCD without any commensurate benefit to the larger public interest and warned the appellant to desist from such actions in future.
Citation: Mr. Devraj Manav v. North Delhi Municipal Corporation in Appeal: No. CIC/DS/A/2012/001283
RTI Citation : RTIFI/2013/CIC/982
Click here to view original RTI order of Court / Information Commission