Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Let us believe in laws

Let us believe in laws

It does really pain when one finds senior officers getting penalized from judicial and quasi-judicial forums. The last few says saw a very large number of senior UP Government officers being indicted severely by the Hon’ble High Court for their alleged contemptuous acts.

Today I saw one such case before me when in one of my matters the Chief Information Commission, Uttar Pradesh  Sri Ranjit Singh Pankaj ordered imposition of a penalty of Rs. 25,000 on a senior police officer, IG Karmik in the DGP Office.  The CIC ordered this penalty for alleged intentional denial of information to me despite repeated orders.

Actually I had sought certain information from DGP office about one of my poetry collection by the name “Atmadarsh”. The matter went from the Public Information Officer to the First Appellate Authority to the Information Commission. When the information was not provided, on last date of hearing on 02 April, the CIC issued certain strict directions. 

Today during the course of the hearing, when the CIC found that the required information was not given, instead a reply giving certain alibi for not providing the information was presented, he ordered the imposition of this fine.

What hurts me is the fact that even we, the senior officers in the Government, seem to be violating laws, while we have ourselves been appointed for imposing law in the society. Again it hurts to know that many of the government servants don’t seem to understand the RTI Act and its beneficiary effects. RTI Act is a simple act which has opened the vistas of governance to the common people and we must all honour its dictate instead of sulking over it. We must also understand the nuances of the RTI act in its fullness so as to be of assistance and support to common people.

The moment each government servant understands the fact that he is there to apply and executive laws and are not law unto themselves and they start having healthy attitude towards laws, including the RTI Act, many of the problems being faced by common masses presently will automatically evaporate in a jiffy.

The real Question is- “Will they?”

Amitabh Thakur

2 comments:

  1. Human society survives on the selfless works and sacrifices of small peoples who are recognized as great personalities in due course of time. On the contrary, apparently great peoples holding big chairs looking only at self interest becomes smaller and smaller as time passes and people deprecate them in due course of time. This is the difference between the selfish and selfless persons. Congratulations to Mr. Thakur and my best wishes.


    Prof. P. Guha
    AGFE
    IIT, kharagpur

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  2. Great .u are doing great service to the citizens and the country - INDIA . Keep it up.Many would follow and emulate.
    This approach and effort will correct many ills of these days-perticularly in Govt depts


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