Information regarding appointment on compassionate ground - CIC: We do not find any other provision under the Act under which a direction can be issued to the public authority to collate the information in the manner in which it is sought by the applicant
12 Jun, 2020O R D E R
1. The appellant filed an application under the Right to Information Act, 2005 (RTI Act) before the Central Public Information Officer (CPIO), Food Corporation of India, Noida seeking information regarding appointment on compassionate ground of Class IVth employees from 01-01-2017 till date.
2. The CPIO responded on 29-12-2017. The appellant filed the first appeal dated 22-12-2017 which was disposed of by the first appellate authority on 25-01- 2018. Thereafter, he filed a second appeal u/Section 19(3) A second appeal against the decision under sub-section (1) shall lie within ninety days from the date on which the decision should have been made or was actually received, with the Central Information Commission or the State Information Commission: Provided that the Central Information Commission or the State Information Commission, as the case may be, may admit the appeal after the expiry of the period of ninety days if it is satisfied that the appellant was prevented by sufficient cause from filing the appeal in time. of the RTI Act before the Commission requesting to take appropriate legal action against the CPIO u/Section 20 of the RTI Act and also to direct him to provide the sought for information.
Hearing:
3. The appellant, Mr. Harwinder Singh attended the hearing telephonically. The respondent could not attend the hearing. The written submissions are taken on record
4. The appellant stated that the respondent should be directed to provide him the sought for information.
Decision:
5. This Commission observes that the CPIO cannot be expected to analyse and interpret the documents for creating the information in the format sought by the appellant. This legal principle is supported by the decision dated 07-01-2016 of the Hon’ble Delhi High Court in LPA 24/2015 & CM No. 965/2015 titled as The Registrar of Supreme Court of India v. Commodore Lokesh K Batra & Ors., wherein, it was held as under:-
“15. On a combined reading of Section 4(1)(a) Every public authority shall maintain all its records duly catalogued and indexed in a manner and the form which facilitates the right to information under this Act and ensure that all records that are appropriate to be computerised are, within a reasonable time and subject to availability of resources, computerised and connected through a network all over the country on different systems so that access to such records is facilitated; and Section 2(i), it appears to us that the requirement is only to maintain the records in a manner which facilitates the right to information under the Act. As already noticed above, “right to information” under Section 2(j) “right to information” means the right to information accessible under this Act which is held by or under the control of any public authority and includes the right to- (i) inspection of work, documents, records; (ii) taking notes, extracts or certified copies of documents or records; (iii) taking certified samples of material; (iv) obtaining information in the form of diskettes, floppies, tapes, video cassettes or in any other electronic mode or through printouts where such information is stored in a computer or in any other device; means only the right to information which is held by any public authority. We do not find any other provision under the Act under which a direction can be issued to the public authority to collate the information in the manner in which it is sought by the applicant.”
6. With the above observations, the appeal is disposed of.
7. Copy of the decision be provided free of cost to the parties.
Neeraj Kumar Gupta
Information Commissioner
Citation: Harwinder Singh v. Food Corporation of India in Second Appeal No. CIC/FCIND/A/2018/146042, Date:-24-03-2020