Majority of Public Authorities unaware of DoPT’s explicit order
Step imperative to assess quantitative, qualitative compliance
Mohinder Verma
JAMMU, Aug 25: The Government of Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir is not paying any serious attention towards the transparency audit of the disclosures under the Right to Information Act and majority of the Public Authorities are even completely unaware of explicit order on the subject from the Department of Personnel and Training, Government of India.
This is notwithstanding the fact that such an exercise has twin objectives—to make thorough assessment of voluntary disclosures and to indicate the areas for increasing transparency in the Public Authorities.
Section 4 of the Right to Information Act comprehensively deals with supply side of information held or under the control of Government and its instrumentalities. It provides the broad outline of the contents of the websites and disclosures under this Section are expected to enable the citizens to access the information held by Public Authorities without their having to take recourse to the provisions of the Act and promote transparency and accountability in the functioning of the Government to promote participatory governance.
As the right to information cannot be made operational in letter and spirit without the Government’s initiative to proactively disclose maximum information, the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) directed all the Public Authorities vide its order dated April 15, 2013, to ensure regular audit of mandatory disclosures by a third party.
“Each Public Authority should have its proactive disclosure package audited by third-party every year. The audit should cover compliance with the proactive disclosure guidelines as well as adequacy of the items included in the package. The audit should examine whether there are any other types of information which could be proactively disclosed”, the DoPT has mentioned in the order.
The order further reads: “Such audit should be done annually and should be communicated to the Central Information Commission annually through publication on their own websites. All Public Authorities should proactively disclose the names of the third-party auditors on their websites. For carrying out third-party audit through outside consultants also, Public Authorities should utilize their plan/non-plan funds”.
“Not only before the bifurcation of erstwhile State of Jammu and Kashmir into two Union Territories even after that no serious attention has so far been paid towards ensuring transparency audit of the disclosures under the Right to Information Act”, official sources told EXCELSIOR, adding “the most shocking aspect is that even majority of the Public Authorities in this Union Territory are completely unaware of the DoPT order”.
They further said, “this is mainly because neither the Public Authorities themselves took any initiative nor the General Administration Department of J&K, which has a key role to play in this regard, came forward to guide the Public Authorities in order to ensure compliance of DoPT order”.
As per the DoPT order, the Central Information Commission is required to examine third-party audit reports for each Public Authority and offer advice/recommendations. Moreover, the Commission is supposed to carry out sample audit of few of the Public Authorities each year with regard to adequacy of items included as well as compliance of the Public Authority with these guidelines.
They further said: There is no justification behind not paying serious attention towards DoPT order as a report titled ‘Transparency Audit: Towards an Open and Accountable Government” was prepared under the auspices of the Central Information Commission (CIC) in the year 2015 which outlined the framework of conducting disclosure audit to verify and authenticate disclosure of information.
The main objective of this exercise is two-fold. One is to make a thorough assessment of voluntary disclosures and the other is to indicate the areas and directions for increasing transparency in Public Authorities. This exercise is aimed at taking stock of, and to assess, quantitative and qualitative compliance by Public Authorities of the mandated suo motu disclosures under Section 4 of the RTI Act; identifying the areas for improvement in information disclosure by Public Authorities and to suggest measures for improving the content and quality of the disclosures as well as to identify the areas requiring special focus or impetus in terms of disclosures.
Follow our WhatsApp channel
