Audio recordings of Lok Pal panel to go public: govt

After earlier refusing to disclose the audio-recordings of the proceeding of the joint drafting committee of the Lok Pal Bill, the government has now decided to make public the recordings.

The response of the government came from the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) in a reply to a Right to Information (RTI) application filed by RTI activist S C Agarwal.

“The audio-recordings of the meetings of the Joint Drafting Committee for drafting the Lok Pal Bill have now become available. There are nine CDs and you may deposit copying fee of Rs 450 so that copies of the CDs can be supplied to you,” the RTI reply says.

Earlier, the DoPT had refused to release the audio-recordings, sating that approval from the law ministry was needed before the recordings could be made public.

“Joint drafting committee (JDC) was constituted by notification of the ministry of law and justice, wherein JDC was supposed to evolve its own procedure. It may be further noted that the matter relating to the RTI queries on audio- recordings of the JDC has been referred to Department of Legal Affairs in Ministry of Law and Justice for clarification," an earlier RTI response from the DoPT had said.

The Joint Drafting Committee, comprising of five members of Team Anna and an equal number of Cabinet ministers, was constituted on April 10 to finalise the draft of the Lok Pal Bill. The committee included Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee; Home Minister P Chidambaram; then Law Minister and present Corporate Affairs Minister Veerappa Moily; Telecom and HRD Minister Kapil Sibal and present Law Minister Salman Khurshid. The civil society members had included Anna Hazare, Santosh Hedge, Shanti Bhushan, Prashan Bhushan and Arvind Kejriwal.