RTI Website Reopens After Over a Year, Faces Issues

Hyderabad: After being non-functional for about more than a year, the Right to Information website has opened for public access but with some difficulties. It was non-functional due to the lack of a security audit certificate, the ITEC department stated in a response to a query filed by an activist under the Right to Information (RTI) Act.

"As per the SDC policy, every web application requires a security audit certificate before granting public access. Due to the time taken in obtaining the certificate, the website was down for some duration," the response from the department said.

"The website has been down for more than a year and even after being restored, it has many abnormalities. Some citizen registrations are not happening. For us, the sub-departments of various governmental authorities are not mentioned on the website due to which RTIs cannot be filed for those departments," said Karim Ansari of Yourti. in.

The state does not have a chief information commissioner and many departments do not have respective information officers.

"The contacts of each and every department right from gram panchayat to the Chief Minister's Office need to be mentioned and updated on the RTI website. Unlike the previous government, this one at least released a notification for the appointment of a Chief Information Commissioner but that was also months ago. Despite one year, this government also seems to be ignoring the RTI act," said Ansari.

As per the RTI Act 2005, each state has to mandatorily appoint at least 10 information commissioners and the term of the previous chief information commissioner ended on April 21, 2022. Since then, the state has not had a chief information commissioner.

A citizen can approach the first appellate authority (FAA) in a department if the information sought is not received and also approach the second appellate authority. However, activists have experienced that these officials work in line with the Public Information Officers in the department and do not provide the information citizens have asked for.