Kohima, February 20 (MExN): The Nagaland Voluntary Consumers’ Organization (NVCO) today informed that it has been doing a study on the use of RTI across the State to find out its impact in Nagaland for the last ten years.
In the course of the study, the organization detected both positive and negative impact of RTI, said a press release from Press & Medial Cell, NVCO. Citing an instance of positive impact, NVCO narrated that a young woman had been rejected for a job (through written and oral interview) by a particular State government department. However, when she filed an RTI, the performance records showed that her written examination marks alone was more than the marks secured by the selected candidate in both written and interview. It was also discovered that the interview board had marked her as ‘absent’ on the interview day. Following this, the selected/ appointed candidate was terminated and the young woman was appointed to the said post.
On the other hand, NVCO also came across number of cases on misuse of the RTI Act such as “using for personal gain, harassing the public authorities, threatening, filing just to negotiate with some financial benefits, taking money and withdraw the RTI application, the public authorities bribing the applicants and attempting to bribe the applicants, etc.”
Meanwhile, NVCO pointed out that awareness on RTI is still low in Nagaland. “Lack of transparency and accountability encourages the government officials to indulge in lower investments due to misuse or diversion of funds for private purposes,” it stated. In this regard, it added, RTI Act can be used as the best weapon which can reduce corruption to a great deal.
It was also informed that NVCO conducted interview with KC Angami, during whose tenure as president, the Nagaland Govt. Registered Class-1 Contractors’ Union (NGRC-1 CU) filed the first five RTI cases before Nagaland Information Commission (NIC).
Angami maintained that RTI Act is also helping in checking the contracts for infrastructural development, especially in tendering process and manipulation of rates. “This law is good for honest citizens but may not be convenient for unscrupulous citizens,” NVCO quoted Angami as saying.
“The union is constantly filing RTI application and even in the recent time we received documents where a lot of violation of ethics of technicality was detected including financial irregularity and also wrongly kept project/ public funds meant for payment in civil deposit (CD),” Angami added. “The union is still working on it and the union would continue to promote transparency in the profession especially in the tendering process by using the RTI law as the best weapon to fight for fairness and reasonability so as to ensure good quality of work in public infrastructural works be roads or buildings, etc.”
In the press release, NVCO mentioned that Nagaland Information Commission celebrates its 10th anniversary on March 3, 2016. The Commission was constituted on March 14, 2006 with Talitemjen Ao, retired Chief Secretary to the Govt. of Nagaland as the first State Chief Information Commissioner along with Rev. Dr. W. Pongsing Konyak and Dr. Kuhoi K. Zhimomi as State Information Commissioners, it added.
