Govt slams departments for not putting info in public domain

The Centre has asked all departments to immediately comply with its mandatory directive of proactive disclosure of information on public-private- partnership (PPP) projects, tours of ministers and officials, among others, by putting them in public domain.
None of the departments has complied with the directive issued by the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) almost over 21 months ago, mandating yearly third-party audit of such information, officials said.
It had asked the ministries or departments to also disclose details of discretionary or non-discretionary grants or allocations to state governments or NGOs and other departments.
DoPT direction was issued in April last year as part of compulsory obligation by government departments under Section 4 of the Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005.

It was mentioned that each ministry or public authority shall ensure that the guidelines for suo motu disclosure under RTI were fully operationalised within a period of 6 months from the date of their issuance--April 15, 2013.
"It was also requested that the action taken report on the compliance of guidelines should be sent, alongwith the URL link, to DoPT and the Central Information Commission (CIC) soon after the expiry of the initial period of the six months.

"It has been noticed that most of the ministries or departments or public authorities have not sent the compliance report or action taken report to this department and CIC," DoPT said in a recently issued office memorandum.

It is once again requested that the guidelines be complied with at the earliest and compliance report sent to this department and CIC, immediately, it added.
The move behind putting information in public domain was to make the functioning of the public authorities more transparent and also to reduce the need for filing individual RTI applications, DoPT had said in its April 15 directive.
Section 4 of RTI Act mandates disclosure of almost all matters of governance by all public authorities on a suo motu or proactive basis.