To call on governor, Opposition leader
TEAM HERALD
PANJIM: The Goa RTI forum has vowed to call on the governor as well as the leader of Opposition in their bid to get the government to move faster on the issue of appointing a State Information Commissioner as well as a Chief Information Commissioner.
Speaking at a press conference, the Vice President of the Goa RTI Forum Rui Ferreira said that they were fed up on the repeated false promises of the Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar who keeps promising dates by which the officials will be appointed but reneges of them.
“We will call on the governor as well as the leader of opposition, who according to the RTI Act are supposed to be the committee that recommends to the governor,” Ferreira said.
They accused the Chief Minister of deliberately scuttling the Right to Information Act in the state.
“The chief minister knows the power of the RTI Act and which is why he is scuttling the Right to Information Act,” Adv Aires Rodrigues who is also a member of the forum said.
He called that the committee chosen by the government to scrutinize the names of those who have applied for the two vacant posts to have not just government officials and secretaries but also retired judges, members of civil society. “Once the names have been short listed, they should also be kept open for scrutiny for the public at large,” he said.
The RTI forum has also opposed the central government’s decision to go in for an ordinance to keep political parties out of the ambit of the Right to Information Act.
“We will hold protests outside the offices of political parties to protest such a move,” Srikant Barve of the Goa RTI forum said.
The Forum has also demanded the following of Section 4 of the RTI Act which mandates that each government department suo moto provide as much as information in the public domain in order that the public have to minimum resort to the use of the RTI Act for information.
“None of the government departments are Section 4 compliant and we cannot take up this matter with the chief information commissioner either, because there is no chief information commissioner,” Barve said hinting that all this was a deliberate attempt to be opaque in the functioning of the government.
Vice President of the Goa RTI Forum Rui Ferreira said that they were fed up on the repeated false promises of the Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar who keeps promising dates by which the officials will be appointed but reneges of them
