Will provide letters between PM and Raja to RTI applicant: PMO

Will provide letters between PM and Raja to RTI applicant: PMO

The Prime Minister's Office has said it will provide to an RTI applicant the correspondence between PM Manmohan Singh and former Telecom Min A Raja in connection with 2G spectrum allocation.

The PMO said it had not denied any information in this regard to the RTI applicant as claimed by him but the appropriate material could not be given because "the actual request made was not" in the letters between Singh and Raja.

The RTI applicant had sought to know why Raja was kept in the Cabinet despite serious allegations of corruption against him.

He claimed that PMO had denied this information, saying it does not have any record related to the allegations of corruption against Raja.

Acting on the matter, the CIC noted that the appellant had "framed his queries in Hindi and his queries are a mix of allegations and his desire for what the nation should be".

The Commission said it has reframed his queries and after discussions with the appellant the reframed query in his application was being given to the PIO.

"As the (Central Information) Commission, after consulting the applicant, has reframed the request as requiring disclosure of the aforementioned correspondence, copies of the same would be made available to the applicant in this case...," the Prime Minister's Media Adviser Harish Khare said in a statement on Wednesday.

Contending that a wrong impression had gone out on the application issue, Khare underlined that the PMO has always, in response to Right to Information applications, provided the information sought.

"Applicants who have earlier sought copies of correspondence between Shri Raja and the Prime Minister have already in the past been provided these copies by the PMO," he said.