Soon, track status of RTI plea online

Soon, track status of RTI plea online
Karthika GopalakrishnanKarthika Gopalakrishnan, TNN | Jul 4, 2011, 05.40am IST


CHENNAI: In a move to promote greater transparency, the State Information Commission (SIC) will soon help individuals, who have sought information under the Right to Information (RTI) Act, know the status of their application through phone, SMS and the internet. Set to be implemented in phases, the new software that is being procured from the National Informatics Centre (NIC) for this purpose is likely to be put through a trial run starting July 15, state chief information commissioner K S Sripathi told TOI.

"Our original target was to bring this into effect in June but there was a delay as NIC was sorting out a few issues with the software. We are hoping to do a trial run of people calling by phone to check the status of their application starting July 15," he said. By August, the commission plans to introduce the option for applicants to check the status of their case through SMS and through the SIC website.

Pointing out that this would spare applicants the effort of making a visit to the commission in person to enquire about the status, Sripathi added that the SIC was also working on organising its files with an efficient retrieval system now in place and trained personnel to handle files dating back three years.

RTI applicants say that the commission has come a long way in the last year. "About eight months ago, the commission did not even put up copies of its orders online or maintain a record of the number of cases that were received every month. This system can be used by applicants to file RTI applications every month just to find out the status of their original application. Otherwise, they would have no idea what happened to their original application," said V Madhav, an RTI activist.

Other activists such as V Gopalakrishnan concur with the observation. "This move will help people from the districts get access to information. For instance, if a person has filed an RTI query from Kanyakumari, he or she need not come all the way to Chennai to enquire about the status of his application," he said.