CIC suggests to make the visit details of the high dignitaries public
13 Dec, 2012Hearing the second appeal filed by the RTI activist Subhash Agrawal who had sought the details of expenses incurred on the visit of former President Pratibha Patil, the Chief Information Commissioner of the Central Information Commission (CIC) has observed that the government should suo-motu disclose as much information as possible on the expenses incurred on visits of the high dignitories.
The Chief Information Commissioner Mr. Satyananda Mishra said "We have been noticing a lot of public interest in the visit of such high dignitaries as the President, the Vice President and the Prime Minister of India. Quite often, one comes across RTI applications seeking similar information about these visits," He added that "While admitting that the official visits of these dignitaries have a strong security angle to it, in this age of transparency, there is a case for placing as much information about these visits as possible in the public domain."
In his order, Mr. Mishra has suggested the authority responsible in President Secretariat to decide to upload as much information as possible about the official visits, specially the details of the delegation accompanying the President, in the official website for the information of the general public. He has specified that if it is not possible to put an aggregate figure of such expenditure for each visit, then at least figures for the entire year should be uploaded.
F. No. 1/ 8/2012-IR Dated:llth September, 2012, the Department of Personnel & Training (DoPT) had earlier directed to disclose the details of official tours of Ministers and other officials. Link - http://www.rtifoundationofindia.com/admin/content/ibcontentdashboard