Chennai: Public Information Officers in Chennai continue to be indifferent and in a blatant violation of a Centre’s recent notification, they fail to reveal their identity, official mobile number and e-mail ID, while responding to Right to Information Act petitions. When DC cross-checked with RTI activists here, most of them said to avail a response from PIOs are becoming tedious and hardly officials share their phone numbers and e-mail ids, activists said.
“According to the Union Government 2015 notification circulated among all state and central government departments, RTI replies by government officials should have the name of the public information officer, designation of the public authority and other details for communication (phone number, email id), but the guidelines of this notification is not implemented in letter and spirit”, said RTI activist R. Natarajan.
The memorandum which insists on mention of contact details of the public information officer is least followed. It has many benefits as it reduces the gap between the information officer and the information seeker, said Siva Elango, another RTI activist. Unnecessary delays could be avoided as doubts related to the questions could be easily cleared. This, however, does not work with the PIO who is keen not to provide the information. With more people empowering themselves through filing RTI (largely to revenue, civil supplies, police, registration and local body), it should be made mandatory to include the mobile numbers of the officers as landlines are largely unattended these days, Elango added.
Admitting that several officers in the capital do not share their e-mail ids and phone numbers, a senior revenue official said there were also cases of public misusing RTI by asking unwanted details. “We are popularising the recent notification and personnel department had also forwarded the communication to all department secretaries informing officials to share their mobile number and e-mail id”, the official said.
