(FE)
Chief Justice Sharad A Bobde on Monday said time is ripe for laying down guidelines on use of the Right to Information Act (RTI) as misuse of the transparency law has created a sense of “paralysis and fear” in the government and officials are afraid of taking decisions.
While directing the Centre and state governments to appoint information commissioners within three months in the Central Information Commission and State Information Commissions, a bench led by the CJI said that there was a need to curb misuse of the law and put in place guidelines to check the locus standi of RTI applicants and put a “filter” on the kind of requests made under the Act.
He observed that the transparency law has started to have an adverse effect given that many bureaucrats are not taking decisions due to the fear of RTI. “We are not against the RTI Act but we think it is necessary to evolve some kind of guidelines to regulate this,” the bench said. “It cannot be an unrivalled right. There is the serious problem of people filing RTI requests with malafide intentions, people set up by rivals,” the CJI said.
