Karnataka's BPO for RTI in limbo

The government’s ambitious plan for setting up a business process outsourcing (BPO) centre for RTI filing is in a limbo as the company which won the bid has had no communication since winning the bid. The government was planning to set up a BPO for the process in Bangalore through which the general public could file petitions under the Right to Information Act. The project, which was expected to be launched in June 2011, has not moved a step, said sources.

“We won the bid in March 2011 and were planning to begin the process in June 2011. However, we don’t have any intimation or a letter of intent from the state government,” said a senior official of CMC Limited.

Major IT companies like CMC Ltd, Mindtree, Aditya Birla Minacs Worldwide Ltd and Wipro had bid for the RTI project. The contract was won by CMC Limited in March 2011. Under the proposed initiative, anybody could file an RTI relating to all government departments and corporations in the state over phone. The calls to the centre would be a premium call from any mobile and will be charged at Rs 10 as the fee for filing RTI, the government had said earlier. The government was planning to make the BPO work for 12 hours a day. “After studying the response, we might extend the timing to make it available round-the-clock. With this, more people can seek information through the RTI route,” he said. The medium for filing the petition will be Kannada and English.

Despite repeated attempts by Business Standard to elicit his response over e-mail M N Vidyashankar, Principal Secretary — IT, BT, S&T and e-governance did not give any response.

According to a senior official in CMC-Bangalore, the project is completely funded by the state government. As part of the plan, the government will give the complete fund for setting up the facility and also an annual maintenance fee.

“I don’t know why we have not received any letter from the government. The government’s e-governance initiatives are to reduce delay in decision-making. This project is caught up in red tape. But we are not aware of it being stuck.”

Karnataka receives RTI filings numbering about 60,000 to 65,000 every year.