Should you seek information from the Centre through a Right to Information (RTI) petition, you better be conversant in all Indian languages.
Even so, chances are you may still not get what you have asked for. M.K. Haridas of The Proper Channel petitioned the Election Commission of India (ECI) for information on the sum accrued by the government by way of forfeited security deposits of candidates in the 2004 and 2009 general elections.
For want of nation-wide data on the same, the ECI promptly forwarded the request, as per Section 6(3) of the RTI Act, to election commissions in all States and Union Territories.
They, in turn, forwarded it to district administrations from where it was dutifully passed on to tehsil headquarters. Each office took religious care to acknowledge Mr. Haridas’ application and he has received over 150 such missives from various States to date, many of them in unfamiliar lingo.
The money so far spent by these offices on postal stamp: Rs. 3,500.
A few of them contained local-level data, but he couldn’t decipher them as even the figures were in vernacular. Postmen at the local post office here, too, had a horrid time sorting the communiqués for delivery as more often than not the address on the envelope, scrawled in Oriya, Gujarati and the like, wouldn’t make any sense to them. Surprises just didn’t stop there.
While a letter from Himachal Pradesh demanded that Mr. Haridas remit Rs. 2 at the Shimla Treasury for the required information (they spent Rs. 35 on postal stamp to intimate him), a message from the Cabinet (Election) Department of Jharkhand was even more perplexing.
It asked him to pay Rs. 1,680 per man hour together put in by the 14 Returning Officers in the State for compiling the requisite data.
“One man day includes one full working day for an office staff bearing Pay Band-II (Rs. 9,300-Rs. 34,800) + Grade Pay (Rs. 4200) + DA-22%. Mean one day pay of 26 working days would be Rs. 940 per day or Rs. 120 per man hour of 8 hours working day. You may deposit the above estimated amount by demand draft,” read the letter in awful English.
This defeats the rationale of the RTI Act, argues Mr. Haridas.
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