Details regarding vehicles owned by LIC and insured by United India Insurance
9 Jul, 2013Background
The appellant filed an application under the Right to Information (RTI) Act with the United India Insurance Company Limited seeking information regarding the number of vehicles owned by Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) which were insured by the company along with policy number; user name and address, Insured Declared Value, make and model and registration number etc. The Public Information Officer (PIO) informed the appellant that that the information sought was very voluminous in nature and compiling and collating the requested information would disproportionately divert the resources of the company. The PIO also stated that the information sought attracted exemption under section 8(1)(d) Notwithstanding anything contained in this Act, there shall be no obligation to give any citizen, information including commercial confidence, trade secrets or intellectual property, the disclosure of which would harm the competitive position of a third party, unless the competent authority is satisfied that larger public interest warrants the disclosure of such information; of the RTI Act as the subject pertained to the business activities of the company and the disclosure would cause detriment to their commercial interests.
Proceedings
During the hearing the before Central Information Commission (CIC), the appellant stated that the plea taken by the PIO was not sustainable because LIC was a corporate client of the company and is allotted a code number through which all the data pertaining to the insured vehicles of the Corporation could be accessed. The respondent stated that the information sought by the appellant was scattered over 1400 offices of the company pan India and that they were under no obligation under the RTI Act to compile and collate this information in the format provided by the appellant. The appellant stated that the Mumbai office had already provided the customer number allotted to LIC of India as corporate client and there should now be no difficulty in providing the requested information to him. The PIO stated that in all probability this particular corporate number was not a universal number through which information could be obtained from all the offices of the company and that the number provided was specific to the regional office.
View of CIC
The Commission directed the PIO to verify whether corporate client code number allotted to LIC of India was specific to the Regional office or was in fact universal corporate code number allotted to the entire business of LIC handled by the United India Insurance Company and accordingly provide information to the appellant. The Commission also accepted the argument of the respondent that the RTI act did not cast any obligation on the respondent to compile and collate information and in this particular case information would be provided only if a universal code number is allotted to LIC of India under which data pertaining to their insured vehicles is maintained.
Citation: Mr. P.V. Subrahmanyam v. United India Insurance co. Ltd in Appeal: No. CIC/DS/A/2012/002021
RTI Citation : RTIFI/2013/CIC/1432
Click here to view original RTI order of Court / Information Commission