Number of cases of corruption and scam brought to public notice since the enactment of the RTI Act – DoPT and Central Government does not have any data on this nor any survey had been conducted to find out the same – information does not exist
22 Aug, 2013Order
1. The Appellant had wanted to know the number of cases of corruption and scam brought to public notice since the enactment of the Right to Information (RTI) Act and the action taken in those cases. His application had been transferred by the PMO to the CPIO of the DoPT. It appears he had filed CIC/SM/A/2013/000413 two RTI applications, one containing five queries and the other three. The CPIO of the DoPT had provided him the desired information only against his application containing five queries and had not addressed the second application with three queries, presumably, because there was no information to be given.
2. We have carefully gone through the contents of the second RTI application. It is quite obvious that there would be no information anywhere within the Central Government on the number of scams unearthed since the enactment of the Right to Information (RTI) Act or as a result of it. As the respondent pointed out, the Department did not have any data on this nor had it conducted any survey to find out how many cases of corruption and other irregularities by public servants or others which might have been unearthed through RTI. Thus, there is no further information to be disclosed in the case. The appeal is disposed of accordingly.
(Satyananda Mishra)
Chief Information Commissioner
Citation: Sh. Pawan Agarwal v. Department of Personnel & Training in File No.CIC/SM/A/2013/000413