Norms on third party audit of information ready: Govt

The government today said it has formulated guidelines that provide for a third party audit to assess compliance of a provision of the RTI Act, which mandates a public authority to put governance related information in the public domain.
The Ministry of Personnel had on April 15, last year, issued detailed guidelines to central ministries or departments for proactive disclosure under section 4 of the transparency law.
However, these guidelines were not being followed by various central government ministries, which had prompted it to issue a directive in this regard.
The departments were asked to comply with the guidelines within six months.

"It was also requested that the action taken report on the compliance of guidelines should be sent, along with the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) link, to Department of Personnel and Training (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," the Ministry had said in a recently issued office memorandum.

In a press release issued today, the Personnel Ministry said it should be a constant endeavour of every public authority to take steps for providing information suo motu to the public at regular intervals through various means of communications, including internet, so that the public has to minimally resort to the use of RTI Act to obtain information.

The release is a part of efforts being made to publicise the Act and make people aware of various steps being taken by the government, a senior Ministry official said.
The guidelines also require public authorities to supply information requested by any citizen and to permit him or her to inspect the documents and collect samples of various works, it said.