Falah Faisal | NT

Jhatkaa is an NGO that works on numerous civic issues, including solid waste management and solar energy, and has to constantly file RTIs. They wanted information regarding landfills and the number of collection trucks in the city and filed an RTI. But when many of their RTIs didn’t get a response, Jhatkaa’s Campaigns Director Divya Narayanan decided to head to the BBMP Headquarters with a lawyer Sreeja. But the ordeal they faced looked straight out of a sitcom. “BBMP’s RTI Cell has been non-existent for the last five years and the list of Public Information Officers (PIO) is hard to find,” says Narayanan who spent most of Friday (July 29) running from one office to another looking for a response. “The people who work there spend the first half of every day attending meetings then take a two-hour lunch break. It is impossible to reach them,” she says after having waited 3 hours to meet Khazi Nafeesa, an Assistant Commissioner who never showed up. BBMP Commissioner N Manjunath Prasad pulled the plug on RTI Cell in 2017. The Karnataka Information Commission (KIC) had ordered BBMP to take action as per Section 6(1) of the RTI Act, which only says that applicants should submit written applications to the PIO. The KIC order nowhere mentioned the closure of the RTI Cell. The BBMP however interpreted it to mean that applications should be directly submitted to the relevant PIO instead of the RTI Cell. “RTI Cell had limited staff, but instead of increasing staff numbers, the BBMP chose to close it,” says Ravindranath Guru, an RTI activist. Since the closure of the Cell, Ravindranath has written to various forums – KIC, DPAR, and the State’s Chief Secretary – for reopening the Cell. In his letters, he said the Cell was closed only to curtail citizens’ use of RTI. “There is no system to address the issues and Executive Engineers are forced to receive RTIs. Unless you go physically you can’t get anything. They just want you to get exhausted and give up. There is simply no access to information,” says Narayanan who received only one response out of the three RTIs the NGO had filed in September 2021 after having run from pillar to post. “The website does open but when we asked, the engineer said it doesn’t work and there is a phone number provided on the signboard outside but when you call it, you reach some restaurant on Sarjapur Road,” she added. Currently, the BBMP website does have an outdated list of PIOs and appellate authorities which is available only in Kannada, with many of the listed phone numbers not working. Yogesh, who recently took charge as Deputy Commissioner (Administration) at BBMP, says they will bring the issue to the notice of the BBMP Chief Commissioner. “There has been no action for five years,” he says. “We need to check if there has been any correspondence from the government or Information Commission since then. And then we will bring this to the notice of the Chief Commissioner for decision making.”