The Times of India       01.07.2011

NEW DELHI: The Municipal Corporation of Delhi's (MCD) initiative to bring transparency to its functioning by launching an online Right to Information (RTI) service last Friday has been lauded by RTI activists. But the appreciation ends there. The corporation is the top RTI defaulter among government agencies in Delhi. Activists say that this initiative will not help the corporation salvage its reputation.

Numbers indeed show the MCD's RTI record in a poor light. Since January 2009, the Central Information Commission (CIC) has imposed 395 penalties on the Delhi government and civic agencies such as MCD, NDMC, PWD and DJB. Of these, 193 or 49% have been against the MCD alone.

"It (online RTI facility) is a good move, but MCD needs to work on its internal system to improve the response rate. MCD has the maximum number of penalties,'' said Shailesh Gandhi, information commissioner, CIC, who has already imposed 51 penalties on the agency this year.

RTI activists are more scathing in their criticism. "It is the worst government organization when it comes to replying to RTIs. They just don't care. They don't even bother about show cause notices issued by CIC. It takes months to pull out information from any of their departments and most replies are unsatisfactory," said activist Subhash Agrawal.

In its defence, the MCD cites the sheer scale of its operations — more than a lakh employees, responsibility of 94% of the city's area and 97% of the population, multiplicity of functions — to explain the difficulty in collecting data and replying to complaints.

To check the poor performance of the civic agency, Delhiites are using power of RTI to make the "inefficient" civic body work. It took RTI activist Mohit Goel almost seven months to make MCD repair the cracks, that had developed on the road near Model Town II market following the construction of an underground parking. "The cracks had developed last year in September, when MCD started the excavation work at its underground parking sites. We had made several complaints to MCD, but nothing was done. The repair work started after I filed an RTI in February this year. If you complaint to them, they just don't listen to you. Once you file an RTI, the officials become alert and the work is done in no time,'' said Mohit goel, a resident of Model Town II.

"We are the first organisation to implement filing of RTI online. It is the second largest municipality in the world, next only to Tokyo's. And through e-governance, we are trying to bring transparency and fix accountability in our system. No other agency in Delhi is dealing with the complex issues like building byelaws and unauthorized construction. Moreover, their jurisdictions are much smaller than ours," said Mathur.